nature

when i was young my best friend's mom would tell us that when it rained god was crying and that lightning was god getting mad and trying to hurt us.

when i was younger me and my sister were hula hooping and then mine broke and all these little bean things came out. so then we picked them up and planted them and waited for our hula hoop tree to grow!
oops...

I used to believe…

That the talking trees in the Wizard of Oz were real and out to get me.

A belief cultivated by my father who used to wait behind tree trunks and shout ' Who's been stealing my apples!' when I walked past.

My parents encouraged us to call sun cream/ sun screen - 'SunSHINE cream!'.

Adorable when you're 4 but I didn't realise they'd added the ' shine' part until university.

Even now its really hard for me to just say sun cream... the other way is ingrained.

I used to believe there were little men and women living among the grass like leprechauns. Their job would be to collect as many four leaf clovers as they can to make it harder for humans to find them and steal their luck. I still take a long hard look before walking into a grassy area.. childhood habits die hard.

I used to think that the fog was a cloud that had died and fallen to the earth.

The region I live in has a river and a beer named after it. This river is very fast flowing and dangerous and as a kid I was always told I was never to swim in it or drink the water (for my own safety.) I always thought it was because the brown river water was actually the beer of the same name and they use to bottle the river 'beer' and if I swam or drank it I'd get drunk and contaminate the beer.

When I was little, I had a debilitating fear of sharks, so whenever I would go to the beach, I would sit on the shore and refuse to go in the water with the other kids. To fix this, my parents told me that every beach has a net around it to keep the sharks out, but fish and dolphins could get through. I believed this about all beaches until I was about 18 years old. How they explained it made a lot of sense...

I used to believe flowers just grew and developed out of nothing into something pretty that had a bonus of smelling good. I was so disappointed to learn about pollination in middle school science class.

One day when I was in about 2nd or 3rd grade, The news was on the TV in the other room, and I heard the news lady say that there was a "weak tornado" in Kansas. Well I thought she meant a "week tornado". I was so horrified that there was a tornado that lasted for a whole week! The next day I told my mom again how I couldn't believe there was a week long tornado, and then she cleared it up for me. I was so embarrassed.

I remember being firmly convinced that thunder was the angels bowling, lightning was the bowling balls striking each other, and rain was God watering his garden. These were the only explanations that made sense to me back then.

I've never been scared of thunder or lightning until the day my mother told me it was santas elves hammering toys togather.

I remember being fairly certain as a preschooler that since trees were living things, they must poop. I assumed they somehow did it when nobody was looking. When I asked my parents about it, they laughed but would neither confirm nor deny the existence of tree poop.

As small children, my cousin and I accidentally broke a hula-hoop, spilling tiny orange 'seeds' all over the yard. So, we dug a hole, planted the seeds, and watered them regularly, waiting for our hula-hoop tree to grow.

For my whole life I have had this inexplicable aversion to weeds. At some point in my childhood I brought my mother a fistful of dandelions. She told me they were weeds, and I literally have not touched one since.

I thought if someone is in a vegatative state they literally turn into a giant vegetable!