A Pile of Leaves (or Lies?)

After happily spending an afternoon amassing a pile of colorfully crackling dead leaves in our backyard, I watched with unabashed delight as my darling daughter ambled into view.  She spotted the newly built bed of fall fun, and with her eyes wide with excitement, stumbled happily in its general direction and Fosbury-flopped into it, her face painted with smiles and the crisp autumn air pierced with her unbrided laughs of delight.  My wife and I stood by, camera in hand, capturing every moment of this amazing time in our family.

At least that’s how I like to recount the tale.  In actuality, it played out a bit more like this.

After a third round of nagging, my wife threw a rake in my general direction and pointed at the backyard.  After about 10 minutes of chain-gang-esque manual labor, I had gathered a small group of leaves and came upon a fantastic idea –  I could use my daughter and some decent fall weather to get out of finishing the rest of the yard.  I went and found her, called for my wife to get the camera, and returned to my miniscule pile of mostly rotting leaves.  Justine stood, contemplated bathing in odorous yard detritus, and instead made a beeline for her playhouse instead.  Under the assumption that “she didn’t know what she was missing,” I coerced her back to me, picked her up and placed her into the leaf pile while my wife snapped “candids.”

Justine pulled herself up and ran as far away from this “fun fall activity” as she could.

Smart kid.