nature

Watching the "Wizard of OZ" as a child made me fearful of the wind. Everytime it blew I got scared out of my mind. I still get a little frightened whenever the wind blows to this day, but nothing like as a child.

My dad told me wind was 'when the trees were sneezing'.
At the age of fifteen I nearly argued with a teacher at school when she started explaining how wind really works.

I used to believe that wind came from the earth turning faster than usaul. So I thought I was really smart because I could figure out which way the world was turning.

I was told as a child that the sound of thunder was from angels bowling in the clouds.

When I was little, I thought the crescent moon was God's fingernail.

I used to believe that if I rocked myself to sleep I wouldn't feel earthquakes, and if I couldn't feel them then I couldn't be hurt by them. I may have figured out this wasn't the case, but I still rock myself to sleep!

my little brother used to plant parsley sprigs from italian dinners in the back yard, in hopes that they'd grow into trees.

When I was growing up in Hawaii I had never seen snow -- except in picture books about snowy days and folded paper cutouts of snowflakes in school. As a result I was convinced that snowflakes were each as big as your hand, and that kids on the mainand spent all their time comparing them to see if any two were ever exactly alike.

I never knew that the moon revolved around the earth until I was in my early thirties...and only then, because I noticed
one night that the moon had moved. I must have missed that day of school.

When I was in school learning about the Civil War, I saw the headlines in the old newspaper about a Divided Nation (Union). I thought that somehow United States had a split in half. After the Civil War, the country magically glued itself back together.

During an Eclipse (while I was at primary school) our head teachertold us that one day the Sun would run out and it would always be this dark. This led to a great deal of crying, believing it was likely to happen very shortly, if not now.

When I was little, I used to see things during thunderstorms. There was a wavy form of a woman's face that would come towards me and get wavier as it got nearer to me. For some reason, I thought that, the wavier she got, the more angry she was and that, when the lightning struck, it gave her the power to kill me and so I would always run, for years, into my brothers' room and hide under their bed.

When I was about five, I used to call pine cones "pine corns", and I thought they were edible, but the green ones on the tree weren't ripe, and the ones on the ground were too dirty to eat.

When I was younger, I believed that the moon always followed me everywhere I went to at night. It was scarry!!

My sisters told me that spaghetti grew on trees. The also showed me a picture from the encyclopedia of a "matchbook tree." They explained that the small, fruit-like objects (which were really plums)were picked and each was individually whittled down to make a perfect little red match.

I grew up surrounded by canefields in South Florida, near Lake Okeechobee. I thought the whole world was one cane field after another.