On a recent trip to South America, I was walking down a street outside Buenos Aires when I noticed gardeners engaging in a very strange motion — exercising their back muscles by pulling this pole towards them while making a kind of pleasant, rhythmic sound as they moved across the area.
At first, I was struck by how strange and foreign this ritual appeared, and then I realized these individuals were actually raking leaves rather than using a gas-driven, incredibly loud, smelly and intrusive blowing machine. As I watched this phenomenon more intently, I observed a woman in her late 60s raking her side yard like it was something she did every day as a form of therapy. And this got me to wondering: could raking be a long-lost art of exercise and meditation that has been blown away by leaf blowers?
I really think so — in fact I think everyone this week should shut down the leaf blowers in their neighborhoods in favor of rakes, whether their gardeners do the raking or they do it themselves. It would save us incredible amounts of energy, make our neighborhoods much more peaceful and quiet and provide a much needed form of exercise, (one especially beneficial to the back muscles), and, ultimately, a sense of personal accomplishment that comes from having created one’s own personal pile of leaves.
