Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: WEDNESDAY, November 2, 1994                   TAG: 9411230072
SECTION: EXTRA                    PAGE: 1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: BEN BEAGLE
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

THE LEAVES RETURNETH ...

I'm aware that they are a tourist attraction, and I think they are lovely - when you can look at them on Bent Mountain from the safety of the convenience store parking lot on U.S. 221.

Or if you live in an apartment and a nice man who looks like Walter Brennan rakes them up for you.

Sure. I know. You like to hear them rustling under your feet, and this takes you back to glorious autumn evenings when there were high-school pep rallies, bonfires that were not the result of arson, and only the police officers had guns.

You used to rake them into piles and fall backward into them, perhaps in the company of a cheerleader, and life was never so sweet again.

Do that today, Eugene, and your back will go completely out for all time, and you'll be sneezing roughly until New Year's Eve, 1998.

I had thought for a while that the ice storms of last year would cut down on my own personal leaf problems. We sawed up enough fallen trees and limbs to stoke the engine of the City of New Orleans for a month. But the leaves came back. It's kind of eerie, actually.

The silver maple in the side yard, for example, looked like it been in the way of an attack by the 2nd Armored Division. A skilled person - not yours truly here - trimmed it, giving it new life and limbs, and its leaf production is about the same at it was before the disaster of last March.

I don't intend blasphemy, but it does seem that if God sends you the kind of ice storms we had last year, he could at least cut down on leaf production this year.

I know everybody loves trees and autumn leaves, but when you come to think of it, Joyce Kilmer never mentioned the fact that leaves fall off trees and for a good part of the year they don't have any leaves when they lift their limbs to pray.

It looks like Joyce might have noticed that. But you know how poets are.

He also didn't mention anything about getting dead leaves off the grass because they might kill the grass and then you have to pay another $200 for more grass seed in the spring.

I certainly don't want to show disrespect for one of America's great poets.

I can't avoid saying, however, that I'll bet Joyce never raked a leaf or sucked one up with his lawn mower in his life. Or got all that dust up his nose.