“You’re cutting the grass?” Betty Keefe asked from across her fence.

Indeed, it must have looked strange to have the mower out when my “lawn” of crab grass and other weeds pretty much stopped growing during one of the driest summers in recent memory. But the mower was out and, after a half-dozen yanks on the cord, it started with a belch of white smoke and a clanking rattle that settled down to a plaintive rumble.

“No,” I answered, “I’m raking the leaves.”

“Oh,” she answered, befuddled, but polite enough not to ask questions.

This was the weekend for leaves.

No matter where you went in the city, people were out blowing, raking and stuffing leaves into bags that lined the curb like fat soldiers in brown fatigues named Benny. Some trees still held their leaves, but for the most part leaves blanketed the ground in a tapestry of reds and yellows but mostly brown. That wasn’t the case in my yard.

The wind did much of the gathering, piling leaves against the house, the driveway and around bushes and fences. My plan was to turn them into mulch, most of which I would bag for the city collection and the remainder used in the garden. This required running the mower over them once and then a second pass with the bag attached to collect everything, I explained. Betty nodded, uneasily indicating she understood.

I find raking leaves, no matter the method, annoying and gratifying. The annoying part is there seems to be no end to it. They keep coming back no matter how many bags are filled. The satisfaction comes in small increments – such as an area free of clutter in an otherwise sea of leaves.

But then leaves, like pages in a book, can bring you back in time and offer stories.

With the first color, Carol used to take the kids on a leaf hunt. They would return with large and small round, oblong, jagged, smooth and veined leaves to seal between sheets of waxed paper with a hot iron. The arrangements got taped to the glass door and, with its sunny southern exposure, transformed it into a naturally stained glass window. Carol still does the leaf panels, but now she sends them to our daughter, Diana, who lives in Wyoming, where they have yellow aspens but no red maples or jagged oaks.

I remember my father raking leaves into piles beside the road before picking a windless day to burn them. I would throw myself into the piles, insulated from the rest of the world in an earthy smell I imagined was like being underground. For a moment, I was invisible, and then I could spring out to surprise my sister but never the dog that often betrayed my hiding place.

Thursday, that memory surfaced when I turned the corner onto Potomac to find George Rezendes with his electric leaf blower at work. Jumping in front of the advancing wave of leaves was Jack, his son. He was reveling in being smothered one minute and then leaping from the brown cloud. I grabbed my camera to record the moment and discovered to my annoyance I failed to replace the memory card after downloading photos.

I went out again on Sunday, with an eye out for leaf-raking. I wasn’t disappointed. Hardly a block from the office, I spotted a couple sitting on their front steps, surveying their nearly leafless yard. They said they still had more to do, although I couldn’t imagine what. Across the street, a trio was vigorously attacking a quilt of oak leaves. I snapped some shots of Alexandra Wheeler and Brad Moore and you’ll find their picture in these pages (Alexandra, by the way, found the perfect way to open the bags: She pulled them over her head and down to her knees).

What I discovered at the next turn was classic.

Stan Stowik was raking leaves into a giant pile with a pool ladder at one end. He said he has been doing it this way for years, and there was no mistaking that his kids, Caden and Emma, knew exactly what to do. They flung themselves with abandon off the ladder and onto the pile.

Falling leaves, the harbinger of winter, offer such opportunities. They make for artistic displays, secret “invisible” hiding places, soft landings and a chance to chat with neighbors…and for phalanxes of bags that someday soon will be replaced by snow banks. I am not quite ready for that.