Do kids and leaves ever get together anymore? Like, didn’t that used to be a must activity in October? And, let’s face it, wasn’t that really and truly the reason God invented oaks and maples?

Now, I’ll grant you that we kids didn’t always like being asked (told!) to rake, but things were different then. Families raked together on weekends when Dad was home. I even think that rakes came in different lengths to accommodate all heights of rakers. Raking together was called a family activity. Okay, a thinly disguised labor labeled by our parents as play.

It is true that none of us kids was absolutely thrilled out of our gourds when we were told to execute this task, but I’ll also admit to — even as a kid — recognizing how nice our yard looked when we were finished. It was called a sense of accomplishment. Yes, children actually doing something useful and necessary, of which they felt, upon completion, a satisfied fulfillment.

No one heard of putting leaves in bags. (Had garbage bags — let alone plastic — even been invented in the late 40s?) No, no, a thousand times no. Leaves didn’t go into bag. They went into piles!

Every yard of any significant size had a special place for that mountain of fun. It was used only once a year in autumn. Easily recognizable, that spot was gray and parched and nothing ever grew there, other than a few of the more audacious weeds — which I guess was every weed known to man.

Our yard had one of those places. It was an aborted entrance to an absent driveway which nobody understood, but was undoubtedly unfinished due to having a perfectly good cement driveway on the other side of the house! This leaf burning place was not pretty, I’ll grant you, and, as I said, it was totally ignored for 11 months out of the year. But, then … oh, yes, then … in October it had its time in the spotlight. If you had such a place, your status soared in the judgment of every kid in the immediate vicinity.

But, now, you must understand that this special scorched earth spot was not the first destination of the leaves. Certainly not! First the leaves had to be piled up someplace in the yard. And like I said, if you had a big yard with lots of heaven sent oaks and maples, then your neighborhood ranking of excellent play spots flew off the charts. Every kid came to your house.

Back then I thought we had an enormous yard — my idea of what was big being determined by young eyes which saw things differently. Of course, having plenty of space also meant you had more heaven sent oaks and maples which meant your leaf pile was bigger which meant all the kids loved your yard which meant …. ta-da … leaf pile status!

During my fifth and sixth grade autumns, a farmer outside of Austin hired us kids to peel acorns for his hogs. It was a mean spirited occupation where the skin on our hands suffered greatly, to say nothing of ending up fingernailless. We were required to not only remove the whiskery outer shells, but to scrape off from the acorn its actual skin. Picture precisely peeling petrified grapes and you’ll understand.

Do you have any idea how long it takes to do a good job of husking an acorn? Of how pesky and difficult it is, and how many of those little suckers it takes to fill a bushel basket? Yes, I said bushel basket. We were paid ten cents for filling one!! Talk about child exploitation!

And here I was with a father who owned a wonderfully successful grocery store on Main Street while his delicate, young, maiden-like daughter was laboring in an acorn-peeling sweatshop! I will confess, though, to loving that job. It was, after all, my first dabbling into the world of commerce.

But, then in my reverie I have drifted from leaf raking. So, where were we? Yes, piles. First came the piles. They were created for two purposes: 1. to clean up the yard and more importantly, 2. for us kids to jump into. Mind you this wasn’t always a comfortable jump. Although a mountain of dried leaves could look like a cloud, it wasn’t always. Any of you can remember taking a running leap and landing on pokey sticks, crusty acorns and even the occasional rock. Ouch! But, the gamble was worth it, because more often than not, it really was like landing on a cloud. A dusty, crinkly, dried up cloud.

So, why has the appeal of this childhood activity vanished? Well, for starters, machines were invented that ate up leaves. That’s because the push mower became a drag when the charm of walking behind it finally lost its sparkle. Thus the power mower was created. Then we began to ponder over why we walked behind one of those when we could hire someone else to walk behind them. Right?

Enter the lawn service.

I know I’m sounding old, but just why is it that there is no appeal for kids jumping into leaf piles anymore? To begin, I don’t think they know leaf piles were created for them to jump into. But there is also another reason. It’s called the cell phone. For how can you jump when you’re talking! Or even more impossible, how can you read when you’re jumping, let alone texing? There is also the additional danger of getting dust into the workings of your cell, or breaking it, or losing it … and wouldn’t that be like finding a needle in a leafstack?

Furthermore, an action like that could break a girl’s acrylic nails, heaven forbid, or mess with her makeup. If you ask me, a girl could save a whole lot of money on eye shadow if she just let a little leaf dust build up around her eyes. And finally, does anyone … really, now … want to be in a selfie with brown wrinkly oak leaf detritus in their hair?

But, what these kids of today are missing out on is what awaited us at the end of our raking toil. The bonfire! Oh, what a joy it was! It defied everything we were warned about — the dire consequences of playing with matches, in particular purposefully creating an inferno in our own backyard!

It was like this. A bonfire couldn’t simply be lit at any old time of the day. No, it had to be in the dark. For aren’t the flames of any fire more wondrous in the jetblackness of night? That’s when every kid on the street found a long stick (the ritzier kids snatching a long fork from their mom’s kitchen) and we prepared ourselves for a feast. It was called Hormel hotdogs … platters of them which Mom and Daddy brought from the house. These we stuck on our sticks and then roasted over the open fire. To be sure this was a daring maneuver requiring caution from the flickering flames, but then, wasn’t that the charm? Like reverting back to Neanderthal days when folks in wearable animal skins gathered around the burning pit, all chowing down together after the kill.

I tell you, it was divoon. But, wait! Divoon got even better!

Marshmallows! The hotdog stick instantly switched to the marshmallow stick. Oh, m’gosh, they were so delicious, you couldn’t stop swooning. That was after you recovered from burning your lips when you couldn’t wait for the flaming lump to cool down. I loved mine coal black on the outside — where I’d wave it around like a burning torch until the flames went out. This left the inside (and here comes the good part) … a melted sugarland. Trust me, you don’t know sugarland until you’ve eaten a burned marshmallow sugarland.

Of course this didn’t mean that you couldn’t also burn your hotdogs. For what kid didn’t like the crunch of ignited hot dog skin? I don’t recall having buns or ketchup for wouldn’t that have ruined the caveman atmosphere? Like how many photos of prehistoric man, I’d like to know, have you ever seen with a Heinz bottle in the background?

Nearly every night in my old Octobers, I fell asleep to the outdoor pops and snaps and sizzles of roasting acorns coming through the window as they slowly smoldered to ashes in the fading fire. We didn’t have a TV smothering that sound. I’m glad.

Peggy Keener of Austin is the author of “Potato In A Rice Bowl,” which outlines her experiences living in Japan in the 1960s while her husband was in the military. Peggy Keener invites readers to share their memories with her by emailing pggyknr@yahoo.com. Memories shared with Keener may be shared or referenced in subsequent editions of “Full Circle.”