Yesterday I raked leaves. I had to. The yard was overrun. My children were dragging leaves through the house. It was Sunday, but my husband was at work. I went outside. I handed my kids their kid-size rakes. I sat the baby on the ground near a pile of leaves.

The kids started fighting immediately and put down their rakes. The baby began to cry. I continued raking. I'm a little embarrassed to admit this, but perhaps an hour later, I think I got a raker's high And then I had my very first raker's epiphany.

I felt like I was living my own definition of eternity. The leaf definition.

I'm not an experienced raker. Where I used to live, there was one tree and the leaves that did fall just blew away. Leaves were somebody else's problem.

But this summer, we rented a house with a bigger yard and a lot of trees, lots and lots of trees -- crab apple and maple and others that I cannot name. I was thrilled with the abundance of trees, oblivious of what was to come.

There were warnings. The first morning we were in the new house, I woke up at 4 a.m. with the baby, and the birds were in the trees squawking so loudly that I felt like I'd moved into a tropical rain forest. It was like being in a horror movie, as if the birds were going to enter my room and with their large beaks, whisk me and my baby from our bed.

Soon after I got used to the birds and was able to sleep through their raucous awakening.

During the summer, the trees and I enjoyed a brief respite. I lay under them with my children. I looked at their shapes and colors. One was a mulberry with berries we could eat.

I liked the trees. In fact when the owners wanted to prune the trees, I was aghast. I loved the privacy and the shade and the feeling of being in the country. And the leaves kept the house cool.

Then, fall came. And the leaves started falling. And falling and falling. I was reminded of one description of eternity: the time it takes for one bird to take one grain of sand in its mouth and fly across the ocean and drop it and then return for the next grain of sand until a whole beach is emptied. I felt like I was living my own definition of eternity. The leaf definition.

The leaves weren't even particularly pretty this year: They just turned brown and crinkly and fell.

I hated raking. I hated all the time it took. I hated the fact that the minute you were finished with it, more appeared. It reminded me of housework.

But yesterday, even with the kids screaming and the baby stuffing leaves into his mouth like popcorn, I realized that I was raking and I was actually enjoying it. The weather was beautiful, I was working up a sweat, and the leaves were, well, agreeable. It was almost as if they wanted to be collected.

I felt an intense pleasure in gathering from both the dark, hard-to-reach places under the bushes and from the easy, open areas of the lawn. A pleasure in moving the rake into the soft surface of dirt, combing through the grass, and then moving the enormous pile to the curb to be taken away --taken and never seen again. I was startled by the revelation of raking as a way of gathering and clearing.

The last time I'd gathered and cleared was before the move last summer. I'd felt enormous pleasure in giving things up, giving them away, freeing myself from the clutter of the excess weight of things. So too now, it was as if I was freeing my little plot of earth from clutter.

I swept the clutter from the lawn and out on to the street and it was an act of purging, an act of emptying. Somehow in that act, I realized that raking was a way of preparing us to meet the long barren days of winter. Raking was an act of cleansing.

I took it, this feeling of oneness with the trees, the earth, and all other rakers, and I put down my rake, went inside, and decided to make tea and let my husband finish the backyard. I figured I'd gathered what I needed.