First Day of Fall!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I love Fall! What is it about Fall that draws us home? Certainly there is a change in weather - is it all because of the weather that we settle in to our homes and apartments?

Football is back and on the TV (which means Hockey is soon to follow. Yay! - Go Sharks!) so we call friends to share food and cheer on the teams. Darkness arrives sooner - already even before the time change I noted darkness at 7:30 p.m. now. Time to come in - the streetlights are on.

The vibrant but fleeting flavors of summer fruits, so fragile and short lived, as in peaches and raspberries, give way to comforting farm favorites sturdy to endure storage needs like sweet potatoes, broccoli, potatoes and apples. We dig out our favorite comfort food recipes for pies, cobblers, soups and stews, dips and snack foods and venture to try something new for company. Mother Nature - ahead of her long winter rest - puts on a final show of vibrant colors bursting in yellow, red, orange and finally brown.

When I was a young girl we lived in San Lorenzo. It was a village and not a town or a city. I always liked that - though not all that certain of the distinction. Anyway, it seemed special. The streets of our village were lined with tall sycamore trees (pictured above) and such fun we kids had when the leaves began to fall. We would pile them up and jump into them! We’d kick them up in the air, press them in heavy books to try and save a special one, crunch them up in our hand and feel them shatter under our strength, hide in a pile of them only to pounce and startle a passerby (we were snotty, what can I say?), and we would rake them. Many of us had to rake our own lawns as a regular family chore. Yes - we had chores! Since we were already out there we became inspired to rake others – for a fee. My brother, my friends and me would go door to door offering to rake the neighboring lawns for 50 cents – 1.50 depending on the size and the accepted offer. This was great entrepreneurship and how I loved feeling that money weighing my pocket down. The best part was that you only had to get them to a nice even row in the street and then the street sweeper would come by and suck them up leaving the street like new. I’m not so sure we would have loved this job if we had to bag those jumbo sized leaves!

FYI - A hybrid developed from the American sycamore, called the London planetree, is the urban tree of choice in North America and Europe. When David Bohannon built San Lorenzo Village between 1943 and 1950, he chose the venerable sycamore as a street tree. http://www.sanlorenzoexpress.com/trees.htm

Cuddle up with something or someone soft and enjoy this new season. <3 Be blessed.