nature

When I was very young, I thought that the sound of thunder came from God driving on the tops of the clouds. I still have a mental image of the classic bearded and robed God at the controls of a Model T, bouncing on the puffy cloud tops.

When I was very young, about 3 years old I thought the sun and the moon were different sides of the same object. I guess I never noticed that sometimes they were in the sky at the same time.

I used to believe that when I heard thunder, God was rearranging His furniture. I wasn't even a Christian then, nor was my mom, so I have no idea where it came from.

Among many many things my parents led me to believe, the two that stick out most in my mind is that it only rained when I was bad (I always found myself trying to remember what I had done when it would start to rain). And the best one, you get canker sores in your mouth from telling a lie. I have managed to keep these "tales" in the family and passed them on to my children! HA!

When I was about 7, I was so naive. My Brownie leader gave me a huge cockleburr & told me it was a porcupine egg. I kept that thing warm for days before my bubble was burst when someone told me it was just a weed.

when i was little i used to love watching doctor who, but found it really scary. there is an episode where strange daffodils sprayed suffocating plastic on to peoples faces. to this day i cannot small them or have daffodils next to my face!

I remember hearing a series of newscasts about a dangerous power plant, some trouble with a power plant, and I thought that it was a big green angry plant (you know, the kind of plant that grows in soil) and that it was throwing a tantrum of some sort and everyone was afraid of this powerful angry plant. I can still see the image I had in my mind of this big plant thrashing its leaves, with people running in fear or else trying desperately to placate it.

I believed for years that the world would end during a thunderstorm, because my first grade teacher (a nun of course) told me when the world ended, God would come down with the thunder and lightning and take up the good people. For years I cried and trembled during thunderstorms. I still freak out a little even though my head tells me to quit being ridiculous.

I used to believe that marigolds would spit at you if you walked by them because my mother told me that they were in her garden to keep away bugs. You had to take a walkway through her garden in order to get to our driveway and every summer I would run as fast as I could past the marigolds and jump into the car or into the house. My mother didn't find out why until I was 18 years old. :)

When I was a little girl, I believed that the sun was "going inside" to get a cookie from his mother whenever it was covered by a cloud. When the day was particularly cloudy, and the sun was going "in and out" alot, then eventually became overcast, I thought "he" got in trouble for asking his mother for a cookie too many times and had to stay inside.

When my daughter was younger, she came in one day after being outside and announced, "Mom, it sure is human outside!"

I once saw some hills in or near the desert around Kern, CA that looked tan with dark blotches on them. My dad told me they were cows eating grass. I figured it out that he was joking, but I still look twice to catch the herd moving.

I used to believe that earthquakes regularly opened up big cracks in the ground, people fell in, and they snapped shut again. Like a big clam made of earth and rocks. So I thought there should be a memorial for all the people who died suddenly in earthquakes. Some of them were probably the only casualties of little aftershocks, too.

When I was quite young I knew there were two kinds of snow: white and black. I didn't know where the black snow came from but I knew where to find it -- alongside the road. One day I said to myself (because I also thought I had to explain my actions by thinking out loud, like on TV) that I was already familiar with the taste of white snow but not black snow. So I scooped up a handful and put it in my mouth. Needless to say, it tasted just awful and I never did that again!

At a mere three years of age, I knew all about how clouds are made. There are several factories near my hometown that have giant smoke stacks, which billow with smoke pretty much all day long. That, of course, is where clouds come from. The "clouds" come out of the pipes of the "cloud factory" and float away into the sky. :)

When I was a kid I used to think that the moon followed me. I would turn around and look up and there it would be. I'd run down the block as fast as I could and the moon was right behind me. I remeber when I tried to tell my older brother and some friends about how special I was that the moon followed me and they told me it follows everyone because you can see it from anywhere. At the time I was pretty heart broken about it.