Leave the Leaves

• Lori Palminteri
• Uncategorized
• October 25, 2025

Raking all your leaves on your lawn is actually bad for your lawn and the environment. Leaves decompose, returning nutrients to the soil. But before you use this as an excuse to not rake your leaves, know that large piles of leaves is also not good. Like most things in life, a balance would be best.

Growing up on Long Island, most of my friends had bigger houses, but my family happened to have the biggest yard. For the most part, having a big backyard growing up was the best. So much room to play various games or sports, even with a large out ground pool, swing-set, basketball court and tree house! The border of our property was lined with trees. We also very much loved the trees, as we were big tree climbers. Easily my least favorite chore did come in the Fall when we would have a family “raking leaves” day. This usually included not just raking leaves on our property, but going to my grandparents also (who had a much smaller property but a ton of trees). This was an all day affair and took all five sets of hands.

Television really lies to you about how fun it is to jump in a pile of leaves. They leave out the part where half the leaves are damp and also filled with a bunch of bugs. Yuck! Additionally, I suffer from seasonal allergies, so raking leaves quite literally released all the ragweed that would agitate my sinuses for at least 24 hours.

Though we had a variety of rakes stored in our shed (at least five, one for each family member), only two of them were good rakes, and the rest were crappy wire rakes that slowly became deformed and gave you hand blisters and also hurt if you accidentally poked yourself. Even though I deplore the cold, I preferred shoveling snow way more than raking. Snow was, at least, pretty and I enjoyed the work out of shoveling snow. My hatred for rakes matched that of Sideshow Bob from the Simpson’s.

When we were close to done with raking our leaves, our curb was lined with bags and bags of foliage, often stacked on top of each other. Some people in the neighborhood would get those orange garbage backs with jack-o-lantern faces on them. I really liked those festive bags and often asked my parents to get those instead of the boring, black industrial sized garbage bags we used. They never did, as the Halloween bags were smaller and cost more money. My dad said they were “stupid” as he said about most things that weren’t practical. Mom liked the pumpkin bags, as she was always the whimsical, artistic type, but she also agreed it wasn’t worth the extra money.

Raking leaves is annoying enough, but truly, the worst part is shoving the pile of leaves into the bag. Usually, you’d need two people. One of us would straddle the bag to keep it open, while someone else shoved the leaves between the other’s legs. It wasn’t uncommon that this led to arguing, because it was easy to accidentally clip someone’s leg with the rake. And again, the leaves would be damp, full of bugs, and smelled not great. I couldn’t wait to shower and put on pajamas.

I didn’t really understand why we couldn’t just burn all the leaves. Besides the obvious logic that the fire would spread and we’d burn down the entire house. My brother and I especially had a little bit of a pyromaniac streak to us. We were generally good kids and would never burn down a property or anything like that, but we loved fire and also playing with fire. I know now that these suggestions are as ridiculous as Charlie Day in “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” wanting to do “controlled burns” to take down walls inside houses.

While I always liked Autumn, with the colorful leaves and I especially loved Halloween, it also always came with the dread of Winter, which I never liked. I hate the cold. And the bare trees, once in their glory of green life, now bare branches creepily reaching for the sky. Warm days seemed so far away.

Nowadays, I still look for every opportunity to leave New York in the Winter— chasing an endless summer, like every surfer dreams of. But these days, I try to be more grateful of every season. Legendary stand up comedian, Eddie Murphy, once said, “you’ve got 75 years, if you’re lucky.” That’s 75 Summers. 75 Christmases. 75 New Years Day. 75 Springtimes with flowers blooming, and 75 leaves falling. 75 birthdays. When you’re young, 75 seems like a lot. But when you think about it in the terms Murphy put it, it isn’t that much time. And it goes quick. So, in between all the things you don’t like to do that every season brings, enjoy all the things that are good. And if you can’t find silver linings to certain times, you best go make some yourself.

And if you really, truly, despise raking leaves, you could always move to the city, and vow to never pick up a rake again.