27 November 2007

Autumn

One thing I miss about living in Indiana is the dried, crispy leaves in the fall. I love the way they sound and feel when crunched underfoot.

Here in coastal Georgia, we have acorns instead. Hundreds of them, hitting the roof and walls and windows like tiny gunshots every time the wind blows. Their caps crunch well underfoot, too, but they don't pile up to quite the heights that the leaves did in Indiana.


In coastal North Carolina we had giant pine cones, fallen from longleaf pines. Those were fun to collect and give to people elsewhere who could be wowed at the size.

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

I love pine cones...I remember how my mom and I used to collect those when in camp on the coast, during our vacations. She used to make beautiful decorations out of them.

And the one on the picture is pretty big!:D

Megadeus said...

Oh, man, you've got the short end of the stick. Here in Texas it's PECANS. A wonderful, wonderful nut, I must say.

MWT said...

I have six of the giant pine cones at the moment. You and your mom should visit coastal North Carolina sometime. Those are everywhere. ;)

We have a few pecan trees around too, but they're not the ones that are pelting nuts at us every time the wind blows. I picked some up once but didn't know what to do with them. They didn't taste very good raw...

John the Scientist said...

"One thing I miss about living in Indiana is the dried, crispy leaves in the fall. I love the way they sound and feel when crunched underfoot."

That's cuz it was your dad who was raking them. ;-)

#@^&%ing maple trees in my New England backyard. The four of them are over 100 years old and drop several metric tons of pre-compost material onto the yard. I got to them late this year and I'm going to have to seed some patches of grass in the spring.

MWT said...

We didn't have a place with a lawn until I was in my late teens. Nobody had to rake anything.

And yep, basically all of Bloomington is maples.

Jim Wright said...

I kill for acorns. Don't have oak trees in Alaska.

Acorns make a good flour - but it's a lot of work, and rather strange if you're not used to it.

MWT said...

There are certainly plenty enough acorns around here to make flour out of them if I knew how (and how to eat it afterward, for that matter). Basically all of the brown debris in my pictures are either acorns or oak leaves. (And all of the green is ferns.)