Here is a knock-you down funny column from the Charlotte Observer.

Leaf me alone!
DOUG ROBARCHEK

Boy, you gotta love this time of year, when the air turns brisk and crisp and bracing and all them other words you normally only see in iced tea and after-shave commercials.

The air gets that certain feel, and then all the leaves turn those unimaginably gorgeous colors and die and fall on the ground and rot. Boy, what a great time of year.

Except, of course, that leaves are no longer allowed to fall on the ground and rot. That was fine for several million years, but then some genius -- I'm thinking Martha Stewart -- decided this looked too messy.

Our great-grandparents didn't worry about the leaves. They were busy getting in the crops. Mowing the hay and piling it up, and picking the apples and putting them in the cellar, picking the corn and the wheat and the succotash and the peanut brittle and putting them up for the winter. And then they would have a big harvest festival and eat themselves into a stupor and get drunk and assault the sheep. They knew how to live in them days.

Today most of us don't have crops to get in, but we still obey some blind biological urge for reapage. So we go out to our fields in the fall and harvest our rich crop of leaves and store them in plastic bags, in case it's a hard winter and the Donner party drops in for lunch and we have to eat desiccated foliage to survive.

Leaves are a real pain. They're nothing but trouble. Even soldiers, for example, can get thrown in the clink for being Absent Without Official Leaves. And they stay there until they ... turn over a new leaf!

But what are leaves, anyway? Where do they come from, and why do we need them?

Leaves were invented by Vincent the Deciduous in CDXWJ BC. Before that, there were no leaves. In fact, the ancient Egyptians had no plant life of any kind. When they made sandwiches, they used real sand. That's all they had to eat. It was like being at the beach all the time.

Then plants were invented, and then leaves, and finally people had BLTs. Before that they were known as Bs. Also, they finally had shade to picnic in.

Leaves were first brought to the New World by a Viking, Leaf Ericsson, who came here to test his new invention, the cellular phone, for roaming charges.

After Leaf Ericsson, trees spread rapidly across the Americas. Today there are, according to the latest official estimate, literally lots of kinds of trees here, including the gum tree, which, if you walk up to it and ask it for a stick of Juicy Fruit, will drop a limb on your head.

But I digress. The subject was rakeage, and specifically how we should rake.

According to Miss Manners, you should grasp the rake between thumb and forefinger, extending both pinkies, and rake in a counterclockwise direction in the Northern Hemisphere. Like most etiquette, this is based on common sense. In this case, the common sense is that Miss Manners is a jerkface. Thank you. You're welcome.

The thing is, raking doesn't have to be a terrible chore. With just a little thought it can become an awful chore, or even a miserable chore.

Take the time to have some fun with raking. Remember how you used to do it when you were a kid?

Rake the leaves into a big pile, then back up and take off running and leap right into the middle of the pile. Then take off running and leap right into the car and drive yourself to the emergency room, because you forgot to take the rake out of the pile, stupid.

Or use the leaves to build a big bonfire, filling the neighborhood with clouds of noxious smoke, causing a Code Purple Air Quality Emergency, in which actual blocks of the air are quarried and used to build a dike against more pollution.

Then be prepared to pay a huge fine, because leaf-burning is illegal in most of the civilized world and parts of Mississippi.

Or you can make a real game of it, like I do:

Pay some kid to rake, pour yourself a long drink, and follow him around the yard saying, "You missed some here. You missed some here. Here's one you missed."