It’s Leaf-Jumping Season

An acre of leaves is a lot of leaves to rake.

When I was a kid, my parents bought a tiny cinderblock cabin and two and a half acres of land in rural Pennsylvania, not far from my mother’s family’s farm. Half of it was forest and half was grass and meadow. My father, having grown up poor during the Depression, was frugal to the core, which meant the unpaid labor—me—had to mow the lawn with a hand mower (a manual push model at first!) and rake the leaves off the grass with, well, a rake.

Summer’s annoying gnats and relentless humidity disappeared with the arrival of fall, and I didn’t mind the chore. Raking appealed to my sense of order, the pile to my sense of accomplishment. Before long, the heap was four or five feet high, and I would eye it from a distance, rake in hand, like a contented homesteader who’d just chopped the last chop on their hand-hewn cabin. It was perfect for catching a teenage body launched in the air. It was perfect for zooming a bicycle through at great speed. It was perfect for making leaf angels, grabbing the rake, and building the mound anew.

Do kids still jump in piles of leaves? Are there still piles of leaves, or are they vacuumed up by landscapers or left to decompose and boost the soil? I hope there are, because leaf jumping is one of the great, unheralded rites of autumn, and I have often wondered if my passion for blasting through things (powder snow, waves, airborne singletrack dust) was sparked there in the pile. Pedaling furiously and exploding into a cloud of maple and oak leaves is identical in concept to the white room of a face shot on a bottomless snow day, and though leaves are crunchy and snow is soft, the visuals and sensations are the same: a blur, a contraction of focus, a sensation of oneness. Like punching through a glassy wave with your eyes open, you feel briefly part of something bigger. Isn’t that what we all want?

Spring is windy, summer is hot, winter is cold, but fall is a mood, nostalgic, poignant, sharp, and crisp. That the heart of it lasts just a few transient weeks, when colored leaves are still on branches and the possibility of Indian summer rises at every dawn, makes it all the more precious. Decay and wood smoke perfume the air, and the sun arcs at just the right angle to bathe the landscape in luscious atmospheric light. And we can joke all we want about pumpkin spice, but is there a flavor that better evokes a season?

The stars of this show are, of course, the leaves. Dogwoods turn purplish red, hickories a golden bronze, beech a light tan, maples a spectrum, and aspens, dear beloved aspens, show off their fluttering yellow hearts. The sycamores outside my yard shed leaves big enough for Stuart Little to run the Colorado River in them, with curling, cupping edges that I suspect would make for a mighty airy pile, just as stellar dendrite snowflakes link arms to create a fluffy snowpack.

Vermont’s leaf-peeping economy—all the money tourists spend to watch the Green Mountains flame into red and orange—is worth six hundred million dollars a year. New Hampshire draws around four million tourists each fall, who spend two billion. That’s a lot of energy and money devoted to looking at trees. I don’t know anyone who travels to watch snow fall or waves crash on an empty beach—though it’s a delightful thought—and yet here we are, all excited about a bunch of big woody plants cutting off their chlorophyll and shedding what no longer serves them.

How beautiful is that? (So beautiful.) This fascination with hillsides ablaze with gold speaks to our yearning for awe and our capacity for wonder and our ability to be enchanted by a slow-motion process of the season. It reminds me that we can see magic in the simplest of things, and we should take heart in this, and find hope and inspiration, and get out there and enjoy it while we can. And maybe bring a rake.