Dear Reader,
South Dakota fall wasn’t quite what I expected, and I am kind of glad for that. I thought that as soon as Labor Day was over, everything would just shut down until spring like the pools. Not that I thought everything would actually be closed, but I definitely thought we would be hunkering down until May. But no, one week was really cold, but the next was back in the mid 70’s, we even had a day in the last few weeks that hit 90. I was also worried that the trees weren’t changing colors, but after the first bit of October the trees did their thing. I love to look out our front window and see the trees circling the dam across the street like a fairy ring.
I am not sure why the last few weeks have made me think of our old home back in Florida. Fall was my favorite season there because it felt like the only one that was not actively trying to kill you. If we were lucky, the hurricanes would come in the fall and not in the summer. If they came in the fall the weather wasn’t as miserable while we had to deal with no air conditioning. A hurricane usually brought cooler weather too. Kind of like a consolation prize for all of the damage caused. It made me feel like we were living in the old days when people worked hard enough that they were actually tired at night and they took time to enjoy the sunset.
In Florida, acorns are everywhere this time of year. The old timers say that if there is a lot of acorns, it means it will be a cold winter. A lot of the time we would use acorns to feed the animals, or they would eat them on their own. Everyone hated having a horse with a habit of eating acorns, something in them makes horses founder. We had an old gelding named Lester that loved to eat acorns. I remember my dad watching Lester eat the acorns and sighing. He said to leave him be and if he foundered it, was his own fault. There wasn’t anything to be done anyways, all of the pastures had an oak tree in them. Sometimes if we had a hog that we were fattening up, we would collect acorns for them to eat. And our goats would eat them off the ground like someone had spilled feed on the ground.
Acorns were great for playing pretend too. We would gather them to put in our survival soup after our dad told us you could eat them if you cooked them a certain way. We used to take our mom’s pestle out to the back yard and grind the acorns up to make pretend flour. Sometimes we would carefully take off their little caps and save them to use for our dolls and then crack off the out shell so that we could have tiny pumpkins. If you found ones big enough, they made ok ammunition for your sling shot. Small rocks were better, but they were hard to come by in central Florida. When I was older and drove to work, all of the roads lined with old oak trees would be orange from all of the acorns that had gotten run over.
I think big oak trees are one of the things that I miss most about the Florida landscape. Their big sprawling branches dripping with Spanish moss will always be a hallmark of my childhood. To me they also mean security not only because of their stature, but because I knew if anything happened, we would have enough wood for a fire nearby. Oak trees also mean something to keep the yard shady in the summer and something to climb on when you are bored. On rainy evenings right before it got dark, I would look out and see their outlines like constant guardians, but you were not sure if they were guarding you or whatever lived in the woods. There was one oak tree in my childhood that had the outline of a dinosaur if you looked out at night.
Fall has always given me a sense of adventure and a bit of wanderlust, but now I find myself reminiscing about my childhood and the place that I grew up in. About thinking how ridiculously long it would take us to collect acorns for those stupid pigs and the sound of goats crunching acorns. I miss the way the trees smelled in the fall and my favorite places in the woods to just sit and feel the earth. The place that I couldn’t wait to leave because I was so bored has become a sacred place in my heart to retreat to when life is too exciting. And when I go there it is usually fall.
