The Joplin Globe, Joplin, MO

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November 3, 2009

Mike Pound: Leaf raking a real pain in the ... back

By Mike Pound

mpound@joplinglobe.com

I took Monday off to stay home and mulch and rake leaves.

I’m pretty sure I’ll be walking normally in about a week.

I’m sort of an old guy. I’m not Larry King old, but I’m not Jonas Brothers young either. I’m what folks used to call “middle-aged” but now call “what’s-wrong-with-his-hair aged.” As a result, whenever I do anything that requires physical exertion — raking leaves, mowing the yard, changing TV channels without a remote — my back decides to lock up tighter than a vote on health care reform.

We have a lot of trees in our yard and, as a result, at this time of the year we have a lot of leaves in our yard. Every year I wrestle with what to do with the leaves. Over the past nine years, I’ve tried raking the leaves and putting them in bags. I’ve tried burning them. I’ve tried mulching them. I’ve tried ignoring them.

Of all the things I’ve tried, ignoring them is by far the best and most effective policy.

Wife (looking out the window): You have to do something about all those leaves.

Me (watching football): What leaves?

See? What could be easier? I’m happy, the leaves are happy and my back is happy. The one person who isn’t happy, however, is my wife. So clearly, ignoring the leaves is not something I can do anymore.

Raking the leaves and putting them in bags is probably the best way to get rid of the leaves, but it is also a lot of work. First of all, you have to rake the leaves into big piles. Then, when you stop to go inside and get a beer, you come back out and find that your dog has decided to run through the piles of leaves and has scattered them all over the yard, so you have to rake them into new piles. Then, once the dog has been locked inside, you have to take the leaves and put them into large plastic bags that never want to open. This takes a long time, and when you are finished, you are left with roughly 200 bags of leaves that will stay in the yard until spring.

I don’t like raking the leaves and putting them into bags.

Burning the leaves requires you to rake them into large piles, pick them up and toss them into a burner. This takes a while, and if you’re a moron (like I am), you might burn your house down.

My wife doesn’t like it when I burn the leaves. She thinks I’m a moron.

Mulching the leaves is not as easy as ignoring them, but it is much easier than raking them and putting them in bags. Essentially, mulching leaves is much like mowing your lawn, only instead of cutting grass, you’re cutting leaves. The one drawback to mulching leaves is that, over time, it could kill the grass in your yard. But, since I don’t like mowing the grass in my yard, the possibility that I might be killing grass doesn’t keep me up at night.

The one downside to mulching the leaves is that it does require a certain amount of raking. On Monday, I tried using my leaf blower instead of raking, but I kept pointing my leaf blower in the wrong direction and wound up blowing things that didn’t need to be blown. The stray cat who has decided to live in our yard, for example, was taking a nap on our deck when I accidentally blew her across the street.

She didn’t like that.

It was the leaf raking that made my back tighten up. It happens all the time. I work in the yard mowing and raking, then I go inside and sit down for a few minutes. When I try to get up and try to walk, I look like Herman Munster.

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