Day 283

When ever I see milkweed pods I'm taken right back to when I was a kid playing outside in the fall. There was a big field next to our house and there were tons of milkweed growing in it. We would pick the weird little pods and try to unwrap the zillions of little seeds attached to their little fluff. We called them santa clauses, don't know why, but I loved the way they were packed in the pods so perfectly all lined up, if you picked them before they dried out you would get all sticky, which of course is what we would do. Many days I'd go home all sticky and more than one santa clause stuck to my clothes, along with any number of other nature type things. My mother must have had a fit. That field is gone now, there are houses on it now, even the fields across the street that were once massive corn fields are full of houses. It's a shame that my niece and the kids in the neighborhood won't come home sticky and covered in nature.

"If you carry your childhood with you, you never become older." -Tom Stoppard