Well, it's good for the muscles anyway

My childhood home had a yard the size of a Barcalounger, but that yard took three weeks to rake. I know this because our parents "hired" their three children to rake said lawn and, by

hired

, I mean we were paid in hot chocolate and graham crackers.

I should have remembered this when, many years later, my husband and I bought a home of comparable size but with a much larger yard. Actually, yards - front and back.

But no. Real estate makes people do foolish things. And we bought the house in the spring. There was not one leaf on the ground where now, I conservatively estimate, there are a gazillion.

"Nature abhors a garden," observed the naturalist writer Michael Pollan. Yards, too. Especially mine.

We hired professionals to attack the lawn until two years ago, when a landscaping service performed an exceptionally bad and expensive job. Bad and expensive are separately unsatisfying but, when joined together, produce a whole new level of regret. The expense had miraculously doubled though we arrived home to find plenty of leaves taunting us.

"It was a particularly wet fall," the landscape guy explained, "and the cost went up because the leaves were heavier."

Oh. So now we were paying by the pound.

Meanwhile, in the many years since my youth, children have grown wily. No longer can they be hired for cocoa and cookies. They are too busy with sports, community service, and college resumé-building so that some day they can be employed as highly educated waiters and bartenders. Yard work is nowhere to be found in the equation.

I decided to take on the job myself. The trick, or so I told myself, was to treat the task as a metaphysical exercise: Does raking build character?

One of the few good things about getting older is the realization that time is limited and there are many skills you will never master. Like raking. Or, in my case, most household chores. The knowledge is humbling and makes you more appreciative of people who can better perform these jobs.

I was reminded of this reading a New York Times Magazine article about the Columbia University economists Jon Steinsson and Emi Nakamura, a couple with an infant, who outsource virtually all domestic tasks - cooking, building Ikea furniture, even editing family photographs - so they can devote more time to work. They outsourced most "humdrum aspects of their personal lives," even when they were poor grad students, subscribing to the 19th-century British economist David Ricardo's theory of comparative advantage.

Generally, this is applied to outsourcing production of lower-value goods and services to other countries with lower costs so more time and production can be allocated on higher-value activities.

The Columbia economists correctly found that devoting more time on their scholarship, and less on cleaning, proved the smart choice. Both secured tenure. And in a lousy economy, there are plenty of people willing to perform the chores we don't want to perform. One of my underlying philosophies is that I work so I don't have to clean.

But all work and no raking makes for a dull, overly directed life. Years from now, if not months, I imagine we will be bombarded with articles on the soul-sucking nature of a career lived indoors staring eight hours or longer at a computer, an existence utterly devoid of beauty - except, perhaps, for a few minutes spent daily procrastinating by looking at Italian handbags and footwear on eBay.

Performing chores, working outside, being humbled by the Sisyphean nature of leaves and lawns, the capricious nature of wind, offers contrast to paid work. "In my neighborhood we all outsource yard work to the City Parks Department. (I live on the fifth floor of a 12-story apartment building,)" Steinsson wrote me, but conceded, "Oh, sure, I find regular exercise very helpful in staying productive."

See!

I view every hour raking as a form of fiscal revenge, saving money that could buy a nice plane ticket, possibly two, or go to charity, while doing a job that has so far proven to be no better than the bad, expensive one I funded two years ago.

Does raking build character? Jury's still out, as are the leaves. Raking is a work in progress, possibly never done, but it does build deltoids and trapezius muscles, to say nothing of lats and forearm flexors.