Childhood Fall

It's my favorite season. Happy Fall!

Growing up in a small rural Midwestern town, fall meant muddy cornfields, big ole combines, and Shepherd High School football.

A lot of my best childhood memories come from this time of year. One of my fondest is helping my Grandpa Clevenger rake leaves. By help, of course, I mean my cousins and I would carefully arrange the leaves into something that resembled a maze across the front yard. We called them leaf houses.

After our leaf house was complete, we would assign rooms and then run up and down the hallways until the demolition hammer, also known as grandpa's rake, brought down the walls and gathered them all up into a tall red maple leaf mountain closer to the street.

A big pile of leaves most certainly deserves a good jumping into. We were happy to oblige until it came time to brush ourselves off and say goodbye to our annual tradition for another year.

We gathered around to watch as our majestic mountain slowly burned away, leaving a small mound of ash in its place. I can still remember the smell of those leaves as they burned - kind of a sweet, freshly dug dirt smell.

What are your favorite autumn memories?