Leaf-raker: A Case Study in Monomania

Out to Pastoral

by John Idol

BURLINGTON North Carolina—(Weekly Hubris)—6/27/11—Before retiring, I taught American literature at Clemson University, my nîche being the 19^th-century novel. When I wasn’t pushing Moby-Dick as the great American novel, I repeatedly gave thumbs up to The Scarlet Letter. There were other fine novels on my reading list—Cooper’s sleeper, Satanstoe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Maggie, and Portrait of a Lady. But I felt a special bond with Hawthorne’s Chillingworth and Melville’s Ahab—because they suffered from chronic monomania.

I have that problem myself—when it comes time to rake leaves. As you’ll see, my case is chronic also.

In their place, I like leaves well enough; in fact love to see them unfurl all gold and pastel as they unwind beneath the spring sun. They’re a cooling friend on a hot summer day as they cast a welcome shade on the borders of my lawn. And when they don themselves in the garb of fall, I rush for my camera to capture their beauty. What else dresses the earth in such a colorful Joseph’s Coat?

But when they begin spiraling to earth, I go berserk. I can’t stand them in my yard. I must admit that piles of freshly fallen leaves momentarily please my eyes and prompt pleasant memories of romping in them with my brothers and cousins before we loaded them on a wagon and hauled them off for bedding in a stable.

Yet, I can’t become lyrical or elegiac about either the beauty or the pleasure. For I know they mean work, repeated work, almost endless work.

Before they curl up and turn from gold, yellow, maroon, rust, or orange to crackling brown in my yard, I turn obsessed leaf-raker. Up they must come, not blown away by a whirring manmade gale, not vacuumed up in bags, but by rake, the most efficient means of removing them. My wife and friends advise me to wait until everything that’s going to fall topples to the ground. “No,” I insist. “No leaf will take up squatters’ rights in my lawn. Off it must come!”

When I pick up a leaf-rake, I drop everything else—an accepted article that I should be revising, an editing chore I’ve promised I’d do for the Thomas Wolfe Society, letters I should be getting off to friends, books I should be reading for a class of retirees in Chapel Hill or at Duke University.

Before retiring, I lived on a densely wooded lot, but my day job kept me from my lawn for long stretches. Mostly, I manned my rake on weekends, even though I felt the need to rake every day. I muttered to myself on weekends, when piles of leaves grew waist high and couldn’t be bagged and hauled off before night caught me. “I’m so far behind, I’ll never catch up,” I complained to my wife, whose tolerance for madness is one of her most endearing traits.

Looking up from my labors to catch my breath and take a few sips of ginger ale that my wife brought out to me, I saw more leaves tumbling to earth, one following another, then six chasing after six, and then a dozen vying in a swirling race to reach the ground first. “They’re driving me crazy,” I yelled at her as she carried the empty glass of ginger ale back to the house.

“You’ll survive,” she shouted back.

If I had the expertise to identify the root of my obsession, I’d likely find its source in neatly sheared leaves of grass or in my love of green thoughts in a green shade. I know I’ve presented myself as a teacher of American novels, but poetry has a far greater hold on me than fiction.

I like a green turf beneath my feet, I love groomed swards and trimmed hillocks. My pulse speeds up when I see a Blue Ridge mountainside swaddled in green, and I admire well-kept fairways, baseball fields, and manicured putting greens.

I seem to have a deeper sense of Whitman’s title and Andrew Marvell’s teasing phrase—“a green thought in a green shade”—when I’m wrapped in green. I know a grove of pine trees, especially a stand of young ones, would bring out the latent Plato in me.

There I could have far deeper green thoughts, but as an admirer of John Constable and the Hudson River School of painting, I prefer wide vistas to Natty Bumppo’s solitude in a great forest. I suppose I should be written off as a garden variety outdoorsman.

Dying and dead leaves, good as they are as mulch and ground-cover, are a depressing sight. They transform me into a kind of brooding Hamlet and lead to themes of failing health and death. Subjects I know should, and do, contemplate, as I move closer to joining the Octogenarian Club

Now, as I sit in my apartment and have no rake to my name, I should be rejoicing that leaf-raking is something I’ll never have to do again. But imagine, if you will, Chillingworth not having Dimmesdale to torment or, better yet, Ahab, settled in his Nantucket parlor, contemplating the stuffed head of Moby-Dick.

There is, after all, something energizing in suffering from monomania.