Barefoot and Autumn Leaves

The autumn leaves have started falling right on cue. For now it's just a handful of leaves gently floating to the grass. In no time it will be tons of leaves. You see, we have a yard full of oak trees: giant Naval Oaks, probably well over a hundred years old, and numerous White Oaks and Scrub Oaks. Though they generally drop most of their leaves the end of winter, they start dropping some of their leaves now. Then there's the next door neighbors' huge Tulip Poplar that drops most of its leaves into our backyard rather than into their pool. I think they've trained the tree to do that. However, since I love fallen leaves, I really don't mind.

To this day, I love walking barefoot in a pile of fallen leaves. I love the crunching sound under foot. And it always brings back fun childhood memories of collecting fall leaves on the way home from school and bringing home handfuls, which my mom probably threw out once I went to sleep. Also, as kids, we used to love to run and jump into a great big pile of leaves and scatter them every which way.

Even my grandson loves fallen leaves. He told me just the other, "You know, Nana, I love falling leaves." In his four short years he's already developed a love for piles of fallen leaves. He loves crunching them underfoot. It's one of his happy memories from visiting Nana and Grandpa's house. Though we don't live all that far apart, we live in a neighborhood with big old trees. As he tells his friends, "my Nana lives in the woods," and our grandson lives in a new neighborhood with only a few small trees.

I'm looking forward to introducing our twin granddaughters to the joys of playing in fallen leaves. At 19 months old, they've yet to have that experience. So this will be their first year of stomping through those crunchy leaves. Thankfully, the grandkids have inherited from their mom, who inherited from me, who inherited from my own mom, the love of being barefoot and of walking barefoot through the autumn leaves.