Raking Leaves, Again

SINCE I HAVE about twenty mature deciduous trees in my yard, I have a lot of leaves on the ground every fall, and I have a variety of strategies for dealing with them. My favorite strategy is to do nothing, and let the leaves accumulate in the yard. When I resume mowing in March, I begin the process of chopping the leaves to bits, which, once begun, tends to proceed rapidly. By the end of March or April, scarcely a trace of last year's leaves remains. They have degraded into the soil, nourishing it. The best thing about raking leaves, my favorite thing, is that its good exercise.If I can put in an hour of leaf raking every day throughout the autumn, the leaves are gone by Christmas, if not before. I want to leave most of them, for fertilizer. Also, day after day of leaf raking should help my fitness level, which is already good, my being an exercise and fitness enthusiast, By Thanksgiving the yard should look good, and I should be in good shae. My mother worked in her yard for a couple of hours nearly every day, and held down a full time job as a nurse, working the night shift as the head nurse in a big hospital. I never moved my mother's yard when I was cgrowing up. She did it, almost as if she enjoyed doing it. I so, I can understand why. I like mowing my yard, and its a pretty big one, maybe one third to one half of an acre. I do it all with a push mower, and it takes about an hour, of great exercise. No matter. if I ever gave or give anybody any advice at all, its to exercise, somehow some way. No matter who you are, you need exercise, as all humans and other animals do. In his literary classic "Candide" Voltaire uses hte expression "we must tend our gardens" This pharse is actually the central theme of this great novel, highly recommended. I like stationary bicycles and treadmills, and I have one of each at home. Then, they also have one of each at the senior center, two blocks from my house, where I go for lunch five days a week. The senior center food is decicious, and the exercise machines help me avoid gaining a lot of weight from all that delicious food they serve at lunch. As I age my appetite doesn't seem to be decreasing, with all those carbs and calories is certain to start decreasing as I age if it hasn't already. I recoil in horror when I think how much weight I could and undoubtedly would gain without any exercise, and all that genroud amount of deciduous high calorie food. Then too, there is tha "Snack Cake" table, which doesn't do much good in helping anybody, including me, lose weight and keep it off. Exercising, in some way, shape, or fashion, is one of the things I hope to keep doing the rest of my life. It helps to start young, of coures, middle aged people who suddenly decide to start exercising and become paragons of body shape and fitness often run into trouble eary on, when they fully realize exactly how much hard work and daily devotion this requires. In order to become and stay physically fit, one must love and enjoy exercise for its own sake, for the sake of exercise. One must enjoy the sweat, shortness of breath, fatigue. ahve afreind ho, when I mentioned ot him that his cigarette smoking wasnt going to do his health any god, replied that "something's gonna kill you". True enough, but does that mean that we ought to kill ourselves? The treadmill and exercycle are just fine, just wonderful, but I yearn for the wooded trail at dawn or dusk.