It's the season for leaf monsters

If, during those hectic final days of election season, you were paying any attention to what was going on in your own backyard, you surely were impressed by the colorful display of falling leaves.

This is leaf season.

For a lot of folks, this means raking leaves into huge piles -- and them jumping into them, often to find out a pile of leaves isn't always as soft as the mattress on your bed. But it's fun, so a few bumps and bruises are OK.

Our sons grew up in the same household -- six houses, actually -- as Blackie, the cat who taught us all some valuable life lessons during his 19-year life span. Among the many things Blackie enjoyed was Halloween and piles of freshly raked leaves.

For all those years that our sons went trick-or-treating, Blackie usually went along, on his own accord, following the group of masked candy snatchers at a distance, arching his back as doors opened and youngsters shouted "Trick or treat!"

Our friends and neighbors frequently asked how we trained Blackie to be a Halloween cat. It's tough to explain, particularly to anyone who isn't a cat person, that you don't teach cats anything. You go along with what they want to do until it starts to look like it was planned. That's as close as you ever come to training a cat.

Who knows why Blackie thought going house to house on dark, blustery nights was fun?

When leaf-raking time rolled around, Blackie couldn't have been happier. He would run from pile to pile, jumping and twisting and diving. At some point he would wiggle into a big pile of leaves and wait for one of us to come close. Then he would leap from the pile and race around the yard in what appeared to be a feline victory lap.

Hide-and-seek, it seems, is wired in to the brains of some animals.

Miss Kitty, the current cat in residence at the Sullivan household, has a totally different perspective on leaves.

When we got her, Miss Kitty had pretty much survived on her own, relying on her animal instincts to stay alive. She was supersensitive to everything going on in the great big world. One of the things we noticed right away was how she reacted to the sound of a falling leaf.

That's right. A single, harmless, innocent leaf floating to the brick patio would send Miss Kitty into a your-life-or-mine mode, often accompanied by exposed claws and deep grumblings from her throat. We continue to tease Miss Kitty, the queen of cats, about her fear of the Leaf Monster.

The other night Miss Kitty was sleeping in what we call her puddle position -- as in puddle of cat fur -- in my lap in the family room. Suddenly she was standing with her claws digging into my legs, back arched, hair standing on end. Why? Because a leaf from a houseplant across the room had crashed into the floor. The Leaf Monster had struck again.

We have three enormous trees in our yard, along with all the smaller ones: magnolia, ash and oak.

The magnolia has those evergreen Teflon leaves as tough as leather that fall throughout the year. The oak holds on to its leaves as long as possible, sometimes past Christmas. The ash picks a day -- this year it was the day after the election -- and loses all its leaves in one fell swoop.

If I had my druthers, I'd like for all the leaves to mimic the ash tree and fall all in one day. It would make mulching (I don't rake anymore) so much easier.

And Miss Kitty could rest easy, going into panic mode one day out of the year instead of staying on full Leaf Monster alert all the time.

R. Joe Sullivan is the editorial page editor of the Southeast Missourian. E-mail: jsullivan@semissourian.com.