Yardwork

Today we had a ward service project. We split into groups and went to rake leaves at homes of older people who could not rake their own. It was kind of fun to be outdoors in the fall weather, and to be doing something worthwhile that didn't involve schoolwork.

Some of you may think that as a Californian child I never experienced the joy, or horror, of autumn leaf-raking. But anyone in my family can tell you that we certainly didn't miss out growing up. In fact, we had it much, much worse than most of you in colder climes. When we moved into our home in California there were about a dozen huge pine trees in our yard. Our block is the only block in the entire city of La Crescenta with these pine trees, and we used to joke that someone 30 years ago got a deal on pine tree saplings and gave them to the entire neighborhood, never realizing the monster they would unleash.

The pine trees are huge, but even worse are the pine needles they produce, which come in clusters of three spiky needles about the length of an adult hand, and the pine cones which are nearly the size of a football. We learned pretty quickly that if we heard rustling in the branches above us, we should get out of the way (imagine a football-shaped object, twice as heavy and a little spiky, tumbling fifty feet to the ground into a yard frequented by young children). In the minutes after the Northridge earthquake, I remember my parents debating whether we should get out of the house, given that we'd been awaken by the biggest earthquake we'd yet experienced in California. The final decision was to stay inside. My parents determined that the danger of our house collapsing on us in an aftershock was less than the danger of one of the kids getting killed by a falling pine cone.

While the pine cones were deadly, however, the pine needles were just plain annoying. Dead pine needles fall off trees just as easily as dead leaves, and we all dreaded my dad's announcement that before doing anything on a Saturday morning, we all had to go out and spend an hour (which probably meant three hours) raking pine needles. Pine needles are worse than leaves because:

1. They are spiky. Picking them up hurts.
2. They fall any time there is a windstorm, never mind the season.
3. They are never pretty, even when they first begin falling.
4. They are accompanied by pine gum, which if you get it on your hand or foot requires, like, an hour of scrubbing with paint remover.

Raking leaves is barrels of fun compared to raking pine needles.

My parents finally had the last of the pine trees cut down several years ago when we re-landscaped our yard, along with the jungle of ivy that surrounded the trees. Although I have lots of childhood memories of braiding pine needles, imagining how to turn giant pine cones into Thanksgiving turkey art projects, swinging on a lopsided swing that we hung from one of the branches of a pine tree, and wading through the ivy in fruitless searches for missing baseballs, childhood memories that are probably fairly unique to my siblings and I, I don't believe any of us were sorry to see the trees go. If my parents had kept the trees, my own children would likely have experienced the good memories and bypassed the bad, since I'm sure my dad would never torture his grandchildren with Saturday morning pine needle raking like he did his own children. But that's okay with me. My family probably has enough giant pine tree memories to make sure that no one in our family or respective neighborhoods ever repeats that mistake again.