Leaf-raking Slackers

Hubcaps for Plates & Banjo-picking Albinos

I always thought that the worst that could happen to you if you didn't rake your leaves is that your neighbors would glare at you, and you might get some sort of citation. Clearly, I lacked imagination.

According to Garrison Keillor, worse -- much worse -- potentially lies in store:

"Those unraked leaves of slackers will freeze and form a hard crust and kill the grass. In the Spring, they'll seed and lay sod but grass will never grow there again, due to powerful toxins created by unraked leaves, and as a result those homes will lose half their value and the nonrakers will go bankrupt . . . Those families will be forced to migrate south and pick cotton and live in shotgun shacks and eat biscuits and gravy with hubcaps for plates and be tormented by red-eyed evangelists and banjo-picking albinos and clouds of horseflies and cottonmouth snakes slithering into the bedroom at right."

--Star Tribune (11/23/08)

So, according, to Keillor, how does one find salvation, if it isn't already too late? Snow-shoveling.