The Awesome Ash

                Listening to the crunch of leaves as kids walk past reminds me of a few of life's gifts that I am extra grateful for.  First, I love living on a street lined with ash trees.   (Actually, I think every place I've ever lived in the mid-west has had ash-lined streets.) The leaves of the ash tree curl up into crisp "C" shapes in autumn, resulting in an air pocket that makes the BEST crunch sound of all our local vegetation.   Tromping along the leaf-filled curb is a wonderfully noisy experience that can only be matched by the joy of free-falling into a huge pile of ash leaves--the air pockets having a very satisfying cushion effect.  If you've ever tried to enjoy maple leaves in this way, you'd find yourself sorely disappointed by their anemic crackling and low volume piles.  The maple leaves, while outstanding for their color, pile flat and disintegrate when you step on them.  In other words, they have a very low fun factor.

                Speaking of fun reminds me of the second thing I'm grateful for.  It is my all-time favorite experience that today's generation will never have because it's terrifically dangerous and very illegal…riding on the leaf pile in the back of Dad's pick-up.  Every fall of my youth, after we'd jumped in the leaf piles and scattered them three or four times over, it was time to haul them to the leaf drop on the edge of town.  I grew up on a corner lot with wide ditches that caught everyone's leaves as they blew by, so leaf hauling involved a number of trips.  Dad filled up the back of truck and my little brother and I were in charge of jumping on top to pack down the pile.  Then we'd burrow in for the ride.  Not only did I love the smell of the dried leaves, I loved being buried in that comfy pile looking up at the blue sky and bumping down the road.  If it was cold out, the leaves kept us toasty warm.  Of course,  we'd be picking leaves out of our hair and sweatshirts for days, but Mom usually rewarded our "work" with hot chocolate or apple cider, which made up for the itchiness.         

                My daughter, always properly restrained by a seat belt when riding in the cab of our truck, doesn't have the same memories, but we still made the most of leaf piles when she was younger.  Some days we would sit in the piles, read books, and look for lady bugs (the real kind, not the Asian beetles we have now). One of the favorite games at her childhood birthday parties involved hunting for candy-filled plastic Easter eggs in a gigantic leaf pile.  At the parties we also had a pile at the bottom of the hill with a plastic slide aimed at it and numerous piles on hand for general jumping and tossing.

                The latest reports say a tiny bug, the emerald ash borer, will reach our state in the next few years and eventually decimate the ash population.  It makes me more than a little sad to think about….