this woman’s work

I’m having chocolate for lunch; that does not bode well for my mood this afternoon.

Raising WEG has a discussion about childhood and memory going on in her blog and it reminded me of something I thought about yesterday while I was watching the kids jump into the leaves. I didn’t leave it in her comments there because what I was thinking is only tangentially related.

Frankie, my nephew, was over for the afternoon and the four of us (Frankie, Madison, Noah and I) went out front to rake leaves. We have 2 1/2 rakes (one is a preschool-sized rake) so while two people raked and one smallish child bashed the leaves with her rake, the other person was minding the dog. At the end of it all we had a big, bushy pile of leaves courtesy of our gorgeous maple. I sat with the dog and watched the children tumble over each other and roll around, laughing.

“HalloWEEN!” shouted Noah, tossing up an armful of leaves.
“HalloWEEN!” shouted Frankie, following his lead.
“HiyoYEEN!” shouted Madison, amicably.

Periodically I would go around and pull the leaves back into the pile while the kids ignored me, caught up in their own autumn celebration. Between bouts of jumping, they would lie back in the leaves and stare at the blue sky coming through the branches.

“I love Halloween,” Noah said with a sigh of contentment. “This is the best day of my life!”

As I was raking the leaves back up, I was thinking about how they were dispersing them even as I raked. “Why am I raking?” I thought. “So the kids can jump,” I answered.

Once I had Noah everything seemed distilled. I finally understood that I was living my life for the living of it. There are the leaves and I’m raking and the children will jump and then it’s tomorrow and it’s raining and the leaves are a sodden mess. Noah has a new “best day” or a worst day that undoes that moment of contentment.

What am I raising my kids for? For the love of it. For the gift of loving them so that they can share that gift with other people. When I take everything down to exactly what lies before me, I lose track of the other things I want for them; they seem less important. But then I’m less scared, too, that I’m doing it wrong or that bad things will happen despite this pile of leaves I’m raking.

Sometimes my days seem very small. Sometimes I look at the stacks of dishes and am disheartened because as soon as I clean them I will turn around to find more to wash. But the point of dishes is not the washing; it’s the dirtying. The point of raking the leaves is the jumping.

“This is the best day of my life!” rustles Noah in the leaves and I think, “I won’t rake forever, I’ll just rake for now.” The children jump, I rake and it’s a perfect eternal moment in a sea of perfect eternal moments. And just then I understood that the rest is beyond me — what happens next, how his memory rewrites this. This is why I rake the leaves.

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