The eyes of a child

 Fall is here! Yay! Florida is really falling this year. What I mean to say is Florida is not hot like usual. We don't have the leaves that change with fall. We have the occasional palm leaves that fall to the ground. Gosh! I hate palm trees! The sun does an occasional blaze here and there. It's Florida! It's the season of perfect weather. We don't really get to sweater weather but sometimes it's cold enough we can wear a sweater. My family and I have done our pumpkin carving and gave the carved pumpkin right on over to the girls....hens. The girls devoured that pumpkin. This was the first year I actually made pumpkin puree. I made pumpkin muffins for coffee and Lawrd it was amazing! What a difference homemade pumpkin puree makes! Of course, I bought one pumpkin to be able to make the puree. If I had known how easy the pumpkin puree was to make I would of bought like twenty pumpkins to have puree for the year! I did go out and try to buy some more pumpkins but the stores are out. I know where the pumpkins are.....I'm just dragging my feet because they are at the pumpkin farms and I have a feeling the pumpkins may cost more. Who wants to pay more? Not me! No other season can compare to Fall. When you think of fall you think of pumpkins, leaves, and windy days.

Every year fall comes around it reminds me of my younger days. Ahhh!, the reminiscing of our youth. Don't get me wrong! It's beautiful to age in life. It means we are/have lived/living. We're getting our life on! I remeber as a little girl we lived in a trailer park. Dad and mom bought a brand new trailer. This trailer was so nice and had central heat and air. It had two bedrooms and two full baths. Behind our home was a lake and you could not go down to the lake because it was fenced off. 

My dad and mom rented a small piece of land the trailer sat on. I remeber one year, during fall, I was in the trailer and I went to the fridge and grabbed the gallon of milk and drank it right from the jug and ran outside to climb up this small tree and sat down on one of it's limbs. I looked out across the lake and right behind our trailer there was lots of brush and the land sloped down right into the lake. The sun was shining and glistening on the lake and the wind would  blow. 

I closed my eyes for a bit and let the wind blow thru my hair. It was then and there I fell in love with Fall. I looked out to the lake and boy I romanticized that lake.  It was so romantic how the wind was blowing and moving the brush and how the sun was shining bright....it was heaven to me. This tree limb on this particular tree became my favorite spot. Looking back....that lake was actually one of the dirtiest lakes ever! The lake was greener than a green thumb! 

It was infested with alligators! No wonder the whole lake was fenced off. The trailer park was not the most nicest place to live but in the eyes of a child it was......beautiful! Beauty in the eyes of the beholder! I sat in that tree with no thoughts running thru my mind just feeling Fall. What is your favorite season and why is it your favorite? 

My family ended up selling the trailer and we moved to Bowling Green. Mom had picked out an old wood house. She had it in her mind my dad and her would fix everything up in that house. Dad had no imagination or patience to fix anything in the house unless it was a car or truck. This house had white chipped paint on the outside and wood floors. It needed more than fixing up, it honestly needed to be torn down or burned down and have a new house built. Anyways, I was twelve years old when we moved. I remeber going inside and I picked a room and made it my own. The house sat on really pretty property. I remeber walking all around the half acre land and it had big oak trees. Dad put a tire swing on the limb of the oak tree. The front of the house had a porch complete with a swing. 

Out of everything in the house I fell in love with the porch swing. That swing would be where I would spend most of my time for the next six years before getting married. 

When I reached my teenage years I loved sitting on the front porch and read books from authors like Barbara Cartland,  Phyllis Whitley, or Victoria Holt. These books were about romance and they were just clean romantic novels....no yucky stuff. Barbara Cartland had her characters talk in such a way...it taught me how important it was for how someone should talk to me. I fell in love with words. I longed for someone to talk to me as Barbara Cartland's characters did to each other. When reading one of her books I would blush as a young teenager and put the open book up to my face to cover my face. It was just magical! 

The church we attended was nearby and in October the wind would blow so hard it would make a whistling sound. Our church had double glass doors and the wind would rattle the doors. In the Hallway of our church I stood far away from the glass doors and was scared because of the way the wind was blowing hard but with my imagination....it was fall and there was beauty to be found there! So! I  forced myself to stand there and make it romantic some how...because that wind was tied to fall and fall is romantic darn it! I remember walking up to those doors and held on to the rail of the doors and looked outside. The wind howling and the trees were swaying back and forth, side to side to the hard wind. It was October, and the sun had already gone down but, hey Fall is Fall and there was still beauty to be seen here. I don't know why I remeber this whole scene but I do. 

I remeber I would get dropped off from the bus and walked quickly to our house. I would go thru my books of Barbara Cartland and pick a book, which had the corners folded over on my favorite pages, and open the front door to the porch and sit down on the porch swing. While mom cooked dinner I was reading Barbara Cartland! The wind would blow and the sun was slowly fading down and I would pause occasionally and look up from my book,  at the sun to appreciate the ray of sunlight and close my eyes and just feel that feeling you feel that comes with fall. I would continue to read until I could not see the words on my book anymore....then it was dark and time to go in. The ending to another day.

Now with dating, getting married, and having my baby, Fall has come and gone so many times. Fall has since then changed as well as I have changed. I close my eyes still when the wind blows but it's not the same as it used to be. That magical feeling does not hit me like it use too. Maybe it's me that's changed? My view has changed since becoming an adult. I've lost that touch. 

Fall is much muggier and hotter now. There are still good times to be had. I hope you will enjoy Fall and feel that magical feeling. I hope you have a great rest of your year and be blessed.