One of my homeowning neighbors was in his yard near sunset (after lunch), raking up a big pile of fallen leaves.

"You think it's done for the year?" I said. "You think you get to keep a clean lawn?"

"I'm sure there'll be more," he admitted. "It seems kind of unfair -- I don't even own a tree."

If people cleaned up after their own trees, autumn would be a lot simpler.

Another homeowner I know described trees as "stationary dogs," because they deposit all kinds of unwanted items (we had a tree that rained baby squirrels one year) all over your yard that you then have to remove. Like dogs, trees aren't particular about whose grass they litter.

So, wherever they came from, what do you do with the tree droppings? Burn? Compost? Bag and leave at the curb for municipal pickup? Stuff an unlocked Volkswagen?

(That last one comes courtesy of my cousins, when they were young. This is why children should be supervised, or possibly staked, at all times.)

My dad used to rake all our leaves onto a big tarp and drag them into a pile up behind the house, where he burned them. Sometimes, I'd go and watch. It was at one of these father-daughter bonding bonfires that he imparted to me the scientific fact that wherever you stand in relation to a fire, the smoke eventually will blow directly into your face.

I never could really see the necessity of raking leaves and getting rid of them. They're biodegradable, so why not just leave them to degrade? This is the solution my urbanite dad eventually adopted when he got tired of picking ash out of his hair.

Apparently, you can't do that if you want to have grass. My dad didn't care because our alleged lawn was a wretched brownfield of crabgrass and rabbit holes. But people who care about having grass have to rake up leaves because leaves will blanket the lawn, get rained on, stick together and create an impermeable shield. You could end up with a terrorist sleeper cell behind your garage and not even know it. Worse, all your grass would die.

Mulching mowers are a cool idea because they turn the leaves into mulch you can then use to fertilize your garden, if you've got one of those. If you haven't got a garden, it's harder to figure out what to do with mulch. It's not good on crackers, even mixed with cream cheese.

I've seen a lot of commercials on TV lately for giant motorized vacuums you can ride all over your yard. They go roaring over the landscape like a Zamboni, sucking up everything beneath and miraculously pulverizing it all into mulch or potpourri or herbal tea. Everyone in the commercials seems almost manic. I suspect they've smoked a lot of mulch.

Maybe we need to rethink the whole leaf-disposal paradigm. Everything we do with them involves raking or sucking them up off the ground after they've fallen. This is totally reactive and inefficient. A truly forward-thinking person would come up with ways to prevent leaves in the first place.

Instead of a leaf blower, what about a leaf sucker that would pull them right off the trees before they even fell? You could vacuum your trees as soon as the leaves started to turn, using a telescoping attachment for the really tall ones. It would be kind of a shock for the birds and squirrels, but you could pick them out of the bag.

Even better: Nondeciduous trees. Evergreens? No good. They still drop their needles as they grow new ones. You'd just be trading your rake for a push-broom.

But we've dealt with the needle problem in our own living rooms, and that's the answer: artificial trees.

You could head down to an after-Christmas sale at Lowe's or Wal-Mart and stock up on faux trees -- for your yard! No leaves, no needles, no acorns, no photosynthesis, no fall color, no oxygen.

Perfect.

No piles for the kids to jump in, no evocative burning smell. I'd kind of miss that stuff, but I'm a slacker.

I don't even own a tree.

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