Scattered Leaves

At the end of the summer I moved back home to my childhood house, the one with the wrap-around porch at the end of the street. In my favorite memories I am running circles around the house, chasing rabbits back into their holes as the sun sets through the golden filters of turning leaves. My memories are silent movies on repeat; I'm the only actor on the set, and the dialogue is unwritten.

I returned home to find that my memories had proven imperfect, and in place of white-washed wooden boards, the porch floor was scuffed and sagging. I kicked leaves through the posts and settled into my mother's favorite rocking chair. I folded my hands in my lap and tried to become as small as possible, thinking that if I succeeded I might just evaporate and how delicious would it be to evaporate and be swallowed by the wind?

Neglect had descended on the house in a blanket of dust so thick I could hardly find the way to my bedroom. I did, though. Kneeling on my bed I wondered what I would see out my back window and if the little boy in the backyard across the railroad tracks still wore pants cinched up above his stomach. I hazarded a glance. There was no funny little boy, no big yellow dog, just a gray looking woman raking leaves. The leaves were piled up in mounds of uniform height and circumference and looked like piles of dirt. I fell asleep thinking about groundhogs drinking coffee.

When I woke up, before I remembered where I was, I looked out the window. The piles of leaves had been strewn about by the wind. I thought of the coconut icing on German chocolate cake.

I made coffee for three and drank it all myself, practicing evaporation on the front porch. In the afternoon I returned to the window in my bedroom. She was there again, looking as faded and blurred around the edges as she had the day before. Piles of leaves kept her company in the descending light, nearly as many as before. But already the wind was lifting leaves up and away, swirling and scattering the work of the small lady.

I slept into the afternoon of the next day, and as predictably as rigged presidential elections, my vigilant neighbor was raking up leaves into their piles as she had for the two days before and, I began to assume, for every day since they had been falling. Into their neat piles everyday, all day, until they were stirred by the wind. In her persistence she seemed never to tire, although her appearance was one of pure exhaustion.

I wondered: In the winter would she pile up the snow too? And in the spring when life returned, what would she do then?