Autumn was always my favorite time of year. The colors, the smells, the feel of Autumn are the things I remember the most. I was an unusual child as I loved school, and Autumn meant a return to the learning that I missed in the summer. Here I want to share a few of my very favorite fall memories.

We had a long sloping back yard when I was a child, and there were 3 apple trees, a cherry tree and a maple tree in the yard. When the leaves started to fall, my brother and I would rake up the leaves into a huge pile so we could run down the slope and jump in the leaves. There is something about the feel of the leaves crackling beneath you that thrills a child beyond belief. When my own children were young, they did the very same thing with the leaves from the 2 Maple trees in our front yard. It was strange but I had the urge to go out and join them in their play, so I did!!

My father loved to go for an Autumn drive through the hills of Pennsylvania as they blazed with the colors of Fall. He didn't care where we went, and many times we got lost on the back country roads and ended up in some farmer's front yard, but it didn't matter when you looked around you at all the beauty available to the eye. Later Daddy would find a park somewhere and he would build a fire and we would cook hot dogs on sticks and drink kool-aide and believe that it was the very best meal we had ever eaten.

I am not much for celebrating Halloween now, but maybe it is because I remember a much better way to do it. Trick or Treating was not a hurried, one night thing when I was growing up. We used to go out for at least 2 weeks before Halloween, and knock on doors for Treats. But it was not the drop the treat in the bag and off you run to the next house. It was a social event. You were invited in, and the host had to guess who the visitor was. We went to great lengths with our costumes so that no one would be able to guess who we were. Of course this was in a small town, where everyone knew everyone, and kids could walk the streets without fear.

Maybe I enjoyed this even more because I had such wonderful costumes. I was aloud to choose from my Aunt's old dancing costumes. What a treasure chest. I had a different costume any time I wanted to go out.

I loved to go out a collect the fallen leaves, press them in the old Sears catalogue, and see how many different kinds and colors I could find.

The Ladies of our church always made homemade applebutter, the old fashioned way. They would put the apples into large caldrons over an open fire and they spent the entire day stirring those caldrons and sending the wonderful smell of spicy cooking apples through the entire neighborhood.

One year the Pastor thought he would help the ladies out, so he built up the fire for them. Instead of using the wood stacked for that purpose, he brought up a shovel of coal and through it on. The ladies were none to happy with him, for the smell of the burning coal nearly ruined the apple butter before they got it raked out and doused. Needless to say, the Pastor was never aloud near the apple butter making again.

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