Acorns

Acorns started dropping over a month ago which immediately got the pumpkin spice in my blood churning- with every acorn drop, fall was on its' way!
 

Over Labor Day weekend we set up a bright cheery red hammock at the back part of our yard in the scrub oak, to welcome in the cooler fall weather air and romantic gold-filled evenings. Laying in the hammock I am far away from everything it seems, just staring up into the scrub oak... listening to the squirrels and birds, acorns randomly letting go and plummeting down to the ground. Every time it gave me a thrill... I don't remember so many acorns last summer, or the summer before. 

Pretty soon our backyard was BLANKETED in acorns. I had been collecting good ones in a jar on our back porch (good ones = still have their hats on), but after a while I realized just how crazy the acorns were getting. The lawn was completely covered, I felt I needed to rake them up before I could mow... and in another area of the yard where I have been landscaping, I had raked them up and bagged TWO giant bags worth. Still the acorns are dropping! On the side of our house there is a little hill that became tricky to navigate because all the acorns under foot were like little rollers sending you down the slope!

My neighbor to the north exclaimed to me as I passed her house, out walking Dozer, "Have you noticed how crazy the acorns are this year?" (she has lived here forever, so she would be the person to know if this was a true acorn phenomenon), "I've heard it means that we have a heavy winter coming!" Really? Could that be so?

I came home and clicked over to the Farmer's Almanac and confirmed that buckets of acorns is one of the signs we have a heavy and hard winter ahead of us! I hope it's true... our mountains have been needing a good snow fall here in Utah... and my baby boy is due in February! I can't think of anything better than hibernating all winter with a newborn, watching the snow fall.

So now when acorns drop, or I crunch my way through them in the backyard, they make me smile even more, my harbingers of fall are now my talismans of winter!