nature

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. :)

I used to believe that wild flowers were really "wild". I was terrified at the thought of going into the countryside incase I was attacked by any "wild" flowers.

When i was younger my dad used to take me and my brother mushroom catching.

We had to leave at about 6 in the morning so that the mushrooms would still be asleep. We had to creep up the field slowly and throw our coats over them before they ran away.

When I was 3, my brother told me there was a new kind of bee that looked just like dandelion seeds. It was late summer, and I had never experienced quite that level of terror before.

My grandfather and I planted a tree. It was only a few inches high, and he told me that if I were to jump over it every day, that I would always be able to jump over it. The important part was to NEVER miss a day, or the whole cause would be lost. Not only did I believe- but I actually jump over it every day for several months!

Someone once told me that mother nature was the Earth. I jumbled this up somehow and got to thinking that mother nature was kind of like santa claus, only she would watch you when you were out in nature and would punish you if you damaged anything. I was terrified to go running in gym class, but would never explain to my teacher why i HAD to run on the mulch.

The worst story, however, was in the woods on a class field trip. I tripped and snapped a branch off of a tree. I was badly scraped up, but wouldn't stop screaming about how "mother's going to kill me now"

My childhood best friend confessed several years ago that she had never realized as a kid that sticks came from trees. She thought they were just something you find on the ground, like rocks.

I used to believe flowers were alive and had feelings. So when I was about 3 or 4 I would sit in the garden and talk to the periwinkles. I would just chat with them to make them think I was their friend and when they were lulled into a false sense of security I would eat them

My Grandmother had an ornamental chilli plant, with lots of small brightly coloured chillies on it. I was convinced that it was a jelly bean tree and thought she was lying to me because she didn't want me to eat them all. Suffice to say I learnt the hard way.

My mum had a rubber plant and she used to steal rubbers from her work and put them on the plant each month and told me that it actually used to grow the rubbers and thats where all the rubbers in the world came from!

When I was 4 my granparents and I drove from South Carolina to Disney World in Orlando, Fl. Along the way they kept telling me about the vast fields of amazing orange trees in Florida. When we got to Florida we drove through these vast fields, but when I looked the trees were not orange...they were the same color as regular trees...they just had oranges on them. I couldn't believe it. My grandparents were surprised by my dissappointment...and quite amused. I still wish there were "orange" trees.

My older sister used to tell me that the foam from the ocean was caused by fish vomit, I was about 10 when I realized she was pulling my leg.

I used to think that the ocean was salty because of the boston tea party, and that the tea never got washed out and spread to the entire ocean.

Apparently I thought that the ocean was freshwater before this.

I guess it never occured to me why tea would make water salty instead of tea-like.

Once when I was young I saw a movie where some nuns fell out of a boat and began to drown. I said, "What's wrong?" "They're drowning." After that, I was scared to get into the tub until my mother told me it wasn't "drowning water". After that, I believed there was a difference between regular water and "drowning water". Some time later, we saw a movie where two people were in a boat on a storm. I asked my mother with concern, "Is it drowning water?" She replied that it was. That was a scary movie!!

When I was four years old my family went to a lake for a vacation. I was not allowed in the lake except for the roped-off kiddie area, but I wanted it deeper, so I spent two weeks getting sandpails of water from the other side of the dock and pouring it into the wading area. I must have been pretty dense because it never did dawn on me that I wasn't getting anywhere.

When I was little, we would always get in a tube and bounce up and down in the pool to make a "wave pool." When we went to the beach, I thought there was a really really fat person in the middle of the ocean with a really big tube bouncing up and down to make waves!