Yesterday, I watched a multitude of vibrant colored leaves fall to the ground caused by a strong southern wind. What once was green grass is now red and pale maple leaves (the pale being the underside of each leaf).

Within a short period of time I was looking at a carpet laid down by nature…fascinating!

I recalled as a child witnessing the same spectacle while sitting inside our home and looking out of our picture window. Then, leaves in abundance meant leaves to play with. Did you ever rake-up huge piles of leaves then run a jump on top of them? I did, along with my sisters. Running and jumping into the pile wasn’t good enough so we climbed our large Silver Maple tree from where the leaves came from and dropped onto the pile.

Unfortunately the pile didn’t cushion the falls as well as we wished so we kept adding more and more leaves to the pile and climbed higher and dropped farther each time. Eventually, the effort and the pain wasn’t worth it so we would stop, but boy was that fun for awhile!

Mom would have liked us to finish the raking job, but we just couldn’t as hot chocolate needed our full attention.

Remember when?