Monday, September 6, 2010

Leaf Houses

In the fall, my mom would send Missi and I outside to rake leaves.  This seemed to be the silliest thing ever.  Didn't mom know that snow would just cover the leaves in a few months anyway and no one would ever know the difference?

Missi and I would take our rakes and start at opposite ends of the lawn.  We'd moan about the unfairness of raking such a big lawn...  Eventually, we'd get bored with raking and complaining about raking.

We started raking the leaves into boxes.  Eventually the boxes would look like the blue prints of a magnificent house.  We invited all of our friends in the neighborhood to play in our leaf house.  We thought it was the best thing in the world.

Eventually, we went to our neighbor "Hey Marc, you work for the Gazette?  Come and take a picture of our leaf house!  It's amazing!  It needs to be in the Red Lake Falls Gazette!"

He agreed! 

We were so excited.

And then, he met us in our backyard and took a look at our leaf house.

"Wow - I'm not sure how to take a picture of this so it would show up in the paper.  Do you think you kids could take these leaves and put them in a pile?  And I'll take a picture of you kids jumping in!"

Well - woo hoo... we got to work.

And there in the paper that week was a picture of about six kids jumping in a big leaf pile! 

We had made the Gazette!

My dad made us rake up the leaf pile and scatter it on the garden for compost.  He said that over the winter the leaves would turn into dirt.


It didn't seem so much like work after all was said and done.  We were local celebrities.

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