A Touchy Subject

When you live on a three acre wooded lot, raking leaves is not a seasonal chore but a never-ending project kept on my vigilant wife’s honey-do list as a top priority. Leaf raking and the lack thereof has always been a touchy subject in our household. I admit that I did not get the last bunch of the 226,000 leaves up off the ground before winter arrived. The forty-foot trees seemed to laugh at me as they shook leaves from their branches with me scraping the autumn ground below their guarded position. So I moved indoors where it seemed a lesser evil for my wife to pester me.

In between hiding the metal rake and praying for high winds that might blow my leaves to a neighbor’s property, my niece lost her expensive Itouch player at our house during a sleepover. When a welcomed snow buried errant leaves, it gave me a temporary stay of execution to my wife’s chagrin. So while I exchanged a leaf rake for a snow shovel outdoors, I turned the indoor of our house upside down looking for the lost gizmo. Flipped beds, a pulled out refrigerator, moved furniture, and a searched basement on hands and knees yielded nothing but a fine toothcomb in our sterile home.

Meanwhile, the white snow melted to reveal the ugly brown leaves besieging the beauty of our property. My wife began to complain about our depreciating property value. I tried to use the excuse of a surgically repaired foot to get out of another round of leaf raking but my driven wife had enough. Mumbling choice invectives found nowhere in our marriage vows, she grabbed the metal rake from the garage and started to rake leaves I would have been content leaving until they turned to mulch.

That is when my wife’s rake got tangled in a wire. Protected by a warm bed of leaves underneath an insulating blanket of snow near the porch was my niece’s Itouch player. Low and behold, it had somehow survived the coldest winter weeks without ill effects thanks to my gross dereliction of chores thus proving there are hidden benefits of not raking leaves for an old man in Old Man winter. Now I am sitting back and reaping the joyful smiles from my niece for a job well done. I just got to convince my wife that sitting on my duff was a good thing after all.