I also wanna build a deck, so I can sit outside and drink coffee while I take in the autumn weather and look at the pretty leaves.
Jeez....what happened to me?
I totally get this, but I've always been into leaves, falling leaves. And I mean literally.
I remember back when I was in scouts (mostly cub, but some boy), we'd spend overnighters at Fred Darby, which is a camp in the Boston Mtns close to Tenkiller Lake, generally in the area of Where the Red Fern Grows. This place was full of hills densely adorned with blackjack and pin oak trees, and in the fall all those leaves would come down and the floor was so thick with them that you could get a big piece of cardboard and go sliding down those leaf piles down into the ravines for hundreds of feet at a time. It was as good as sledding after a big snow. Now, it should be acknowledged that not infrequently one of those big slides would come to a sudden stop when you hit some rock outcrop, but we were young and no one broke anything that I heard of anyway. And so like in a sledding day (eastern Okla had about four good sleddable snows a year - not as good as where FF is from but still some respectable snow days would always happen), we'd trudge back up to the top of the hillslope and go careening down again, daring those hidden rock outcrops to do whatever damage they could.
So, for me, big piles of deciduous leaves had a very active element to them growing up, right in there with bouncing a basketball or riding your banana bike around a dirt track jumping ramps.
Now, though, as I'm too old to do anything as nutty as slide down a rocky hillslope covered in leaves on a piece of cardboard into a ravine, I'm perfectly fine just to sip my tea, ideally after having enjoyed one of my remaining edibles from an Oregon dispensary, and look out over a landscape of leaves, particularly red ones from oak trees, and my new digs here in Md are full of oaks among other trees like maples, and reminisce about leaf sledding days of yesteryear.
