"Raking" leaves

I love autumn.  The colors, the swirling, drifting, rustling leaves, the drop in temperature.  There's nothing I can think of about fall that I don't like.  Spring, so much the favorite of so many, takes a back seat on my seasonal priority list.

Autumn, though, is a cause for some concern around here.  The leaves that have fallen have to be gotten up!  And, the sooner the better ... 

I'm reminded of friends we made while we lived in the Philadelphia area during the late 1990s.  There was a tradition in their household.  It was on Thanksgiving morning, after breakfast and before the feast, that everyone who had gathered there for the day raked the yard.  The fall before Tal and I moved to Pennsylvania had been the precursor to an early and hard winter.  During the week before Thanksgiving that particular year a considerable snow fell, keeping the traditional raking from happening.  After that snow, came rain which froze immediately, and so it went for months.  It was late March before those leaves were seen again, much less moved off the grass.

Anyway, the leaves were falling when Tal and I arrived home from our Utah adventure some three weeks ago.  There has been rain, appointments with doctors, rounds of golf.  The leaves were left to fall.  Until today.  Tal put the grass catchers on the big mower and set to work shortly after breakfast.  By lunch the yard looked so nice I had to commemorate the transformation by taking the camera for a walk about. 

Plus, here's the thing about fall. There are still leaves clinging to the trees, so this mid-day view won't last long.

I especially like this view of the side yard -- the shadows cast by the house and porch across the grass and that line of orange bald cypress trees.