The Iowa Experiment - Day #17 - Leaves, leaves, and more leaves

With a deep sigh and a final promise by my brother Brent that he'll come by tomorrow and help me with mounting a towel rack and a toilet paper holder, I can honestly say that the house is done. It's beautiful. I can't wait to see Eric's face when he walks into his own home for the first time.

Friends keep asking me if I feel different. 

Sunday was a beautiful fall Iowa day. 60 degrees and sunshine. Our neighborhood is a sea of various oak trees with houses peeking out in a pattern that seems created only with the woods permission. There are leaves. TONS of leaves. And I'm learning about Oak trees. Their leaves fall late, and there are a lot of them. You can rake and rake and rake, and it will look as if you never raked to begin with.

Sunday I raked, and raked, and bagged and hauled. From a warm and sunshine-filled twelve noon till a cool gray 6PM dusk.

In the mid-afternoon sunshine, I was smiling, it was peaceful. I put on my headphones and selected Chris Botti on the ipod. Then Warren Zevon...then shuffled through my old running mix that always brought me an easy going happiness when I went for short 5 mile treks along the Chicago lakefront. For a while, I was actually having fun.

As the sun's warmth faded, and my leaf piles grew taller, my progress slower, my back ached. My legs itched and my eyes scratched. I had 15 bags of leaves at the end of my driveway, waiting for the next days garbage pickup. I looked back at my lawn in a quiet surrender. I didn't make a dent.

Today my neighbor hired a landscaper to "rake" his leaves. I watched out my window this morning as this woman dressed in overalls, fall jacket and ballcap strapped a high-powered blower to her back and noisily took over. I saw the leaves swirl in the wind and ultimately land in a messy pile. I watched rebellious leaves carry their way into my yard, into my driveway, back into my life. Fuck.

I can't wait to see Eric's face when I happily hand the garden rake and city-approved lawn bags over to him to finish the job.

Do I feel different? Not yet. I keep checking to see if I am. I keep opening the oven door of my life and in the same instant am clueless as to why the cake isn't baking. Cause I keep opening the damn door.

I think I'm just adapting. Life is a giant racquetball game, and you gotta stay alert. You gotta hit or dodge and various motions in between. That's what I'm doing right now. For the moment this is the best I can ask for. I rake leaves. I turn around and their are more leaves. I'd open the oven door, but I'm too damn busy raking leaves to bake anything just yet.