nature

I remember thinking that when a sun went behind a cloud and things were a little darker because you were in the cloud's shadow what actually happened was a big factory just shut off all the lights and caused the world to get a little bit darker.

My sister and I believed that we lived inside the earth and that when they sent shuttles into space someone would have to go up on a giant ladder to patch the hole in the sky.

The first time I ever saw yucca plants, my mother told me they were pineapple plants and that the pineapples themselves grew underground. I believed that for quite some time. I still don't know if my mother ever thought it was really true.

For a time as a child, I was totally convinced that I had been to a city on the planet Neptune. The clearest memory I had of the place was how at each end of the main street, atop a pole like a telephone pole, there was an array of horns, resembling loudspeakers like I'd seen at football stadiums. I wondered what those horns were for. I never heard any sound come from them.

When I was about 8,a tornado hit my house so we had to go live with my grandmother for a few months while our house got re-built and the reporters came over to interview us. I was mad about having to move, but I was most upset about the fact that the whole time, I thought the tornado was just a really angry man that just got so angry he spun around really fast until he would spin so fast he sucked things up. There is actually a quote of me in the newspaper that says I thought the tornado was an angry man...and my whole family made fun of me.

When i was little my mom had a garden and one time when my brother was out there he teased me that if i went into a garden muskrats would come out of the ground and eat it took my mom along time to convince me otherwize

On one particular visit with my grandparents, when I was very young, I remember playing on the living room floor and finding a little piece of clear plastic that had apparently broken off of something. I was very excited, however, and ran into the kitchen where the adults were so I could show them the piece of "dry water" I had found. They kidded me about that for years...hey, it made sense at the time.

My grandpa used to tell us that the thunder and lightning was the angels bowling in the heavens. Whenever they got a strike, it would lightening. I know now that lightening causes the thunder not the other way around, but I used to think "of course they are good bowlers, they're angels!"

when i was a child, i used to be terrified of thunder & lightening, so my mom would tell me that Mary was making homemade pasta & was dropping the rolling pin (thunder) & that jesus was taking pictures (lightening)... i would go right to slepp after that...

I used to be scared to death of thunder and lightening, I flat refused to go to bed if it was storming outside, so one day my dad told me not to be afraid of it because it was just mother nature burping and farting in the shower. I actually still think there is truth to that, lol

I used to believe that rocks could grow. We used to go to the lake when we were kids and on the way there was a big boulder in the middle of a field. My father told me that when he was a little boy that the boulder was just a pebble. I was convinved that every year the rock was getting just a little bigger.

I had a recurring dream that an earthquake hit Phoenix and the ground cracked open sucking my grandpa into some great abyss. I always thought I was psychic and that dream was true, and any time a plane would fly overhead and shake the house a little, I would grab my grandpa's hand to "save" him from being sucked down into the middle of the earth.

We lived in an area surrounded by farmland, mostly growing potatoes, and whenever it thundered, my dad would say, "They must be loading spuds in Tulelake!" That must have kept me calm when the loud roll of the thunder started.

one day in first grade the teacher was telling us about weather baloons. i asked how the the baloon let us know what weather was up there and she explained that the ballon had instruments in it. That baffled me for quite some time... i assumed that the ballon had musical instruments such as a drum, trumpet, guitar etc... and somehow a specific weather condition would make the instruments play different tunes. i wondered if the scientist had to hear the tune while it was still high in the air or if when they brought it back down, it was still playing the tune.

i now have a degree in climatology and am working in the insurance business... go figure!

When I was 5 I used to believe that a tornado was a big ball that smashed everything that it rolled over.

So one day me and my friend tried to make a tornado trap. We used wood with nails sticking up so that when the tornado rolled over it, it would pop. It never worked, I was upset until I saw a real tornado on tv.

I grew up in a small town with a factory on the outskirts. This factory processed the diatomacious earth that is found prevelant in our area, and we were facinated by the white fluffy smoke stacks that billowed during operation. My brother and I always thought that what this factory did was to make clouds and these floated all over the world. We were so convinced that this was a cloud factory! To this day, we still call the plant the "Cloud Factory".