nature

When I was young I could never figure out why I couldn't see the bunnies in the river. My parents would always look at the river and comment about how fast the rabbits were (rapids).

I used to believe that whenever it rained, God was taking a shower.

When I was 7 or 8 I noticed those orange balls on some wires going across open fields and asked my aunt what they were, and because of what she told me I believed until I was 17 years old that they were basketballs kids had got stuck up there on the wire.

As a small child I must have believed that trees were highly flexible since they were responsible for creating the wind when they thrashed around.

When I was little, I thought that weather balloons actually made the weather the way it was. I thought that the weather men on television decided what the balloons would deliver us.

When I was really young, my family and I used to take trips to an area of Texas called the Hill Country. I always thought everyone was saying the "Hill Crunchy" and thought that somewhere in the area I would see some big, crunchy, potato-chip hills...

I used to believe that each state in the continental US had a big red line painted around its border, like on a map of the US. When on vacation with my family, I eagerly looked for these lines when we crossed state boundaries, and was very disappointed to not see them!

I used to believe that, when it rained in my city, it rained all over the world. It took me a couple years (of young childhood, like, before grade school) and of watching the weather channel on TV as punishment, lol) to figure out that it rained in different areas at different times. Of course, I rarely see someone that was as dumb as I was back in those days.

When I was about 3 or 4 I tomato and tornado sounded the same to me. So one time my dad told me that there was a tornado warning so I went up to my mom and brother and said "Theres a tomato warning!!"

When I was very young my family lived in a neighborhood with a lot of pre-adolescent boys who liked to trick me. One time they convinced me that because I picked up a rotted old branch that fell off the tree, that I was going to get a disease and die. They called it "disease wood", though technically I guess you'd call it diseased wood. Anytime I see a dried out, withered branch I remember that incident.

I remember that when my sister and I were young, we used to run around our backyard and she would always eat dandelions. One day, while she was mid-chomp on this huge dandelion, I screamed and convinced her that they were poisonous. I think she thought they were poisonous until she was 12.

When I was young, I thought that the chirping sound that we always heard outside at night was the sound of the stars twinkling. Only later I found out it was really crickets chirping.

I used to belive that pussy willows were kitten seeds. And that if you let the sun get to them after you picked them they would die. Me and my cousin would spend hours after we picked them tring to find a dark spot so they could turn in to kittens.

As a kid in New York State we had a modest garden and a grape vine but no vine fruits that need a hot summer. So I grew up imagining what a tough, monster, tangled, Herculean vine watermelons hung from.

My 3 year old niece wanted to know what color her swing set was. She was told it had been red but that the sun faded it out. She tells the sun every day that her favorite color is purple in the belief that the sun will change it to that color.

I used to believe that the stars were holes in the roof of the world, and the light shining through the holes was the light from heaven.