and Halloween Pages
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Summer season of 2009 is now behind us and the kids are back in school again. Fall has arrived and Halloween will be here before you know it. I publish these pages each year as my way of getting into the Fall-Halloween spirit; sharing some of my memories of the season and of our family's Halloweens past.
To those who chance upon
my Fall &
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An adult now (my wife might take some exception to "adult" from
time to time
One of the fall rituals I vividly remember as a kid in Chicago was raking the leaves. Not that raking leaves was, in itself, all that wonderful; it was that my Dad made it fun. I may have been the only kid in my neighborhood who actually enjoyed raking leaves. We had 10-12 Oak and Maple trees on our property, along with a Tulip tree which had huge leaves, and my dad and I usually did that chore together on Saturday afternoons. More often than not, as soon as we got them raked into a pile I'd jump in them and throw them all around. My dad would always laugh but then he gave me the job of raking them back into a pile second time on my own. The leaf pile attraction must be hereditary as all three of our daughters did the same thing when they were kids.
In the shot at left, Caroline is jumping into a pile of leaves in our yard in Virginia in the late 1980s.
And the tradition continues. On a beautiful late fall day in 2002 I was doing some yard work. It was 10 November, the anniversary of the creation of my beloved Marine Corps, and Hil and I were meeting a Marine buddy that evening for dinner and a couple beers to celebrate. Since I'd taken the day off, I was catching up on a couple chores before getting ready to go meet Larry. After raking the leaves into a pile in the side yard, I had gone around to the back to rake the leaves
there. Within about 10 minutes I heard laughing and
squealing from the side yard and I went to see The picture at right shows Denise with her children, Cameron and Sydney, playing in the leaf pile I'd just raked in our yard on 10 Nov 02 |