Autumn Leaves

While waiting to hear from my editor I decided to clean the garage so we can get the car into the garage before the snow starts to fall. I don’t know how so much stuff can accumulate in the garage in just four months.
On our way back from New York Tom noticed the green leaves turning red and yellow on a few trees. I just hope when Jack Frost turns the rest of the leaves Tom doesn’t get his uncontrollable desire to take his annual one-hundred-twenty mile trip through the mountains to see the colored leaves. The trip isn’t too bad now since the kids are gone. But when we took this yearly trip in autumn with three kids in the back seat it was miserable. I relate our many family trips and vacations in my book with three kids in a space three feet by five. Why we took these trips with three kids who couldn’t travel one mile without bickering over one thing or another is beyond me. I thought it would be educational for the kids to visit other states. But Tom was obsessed when he got behind that wheel. He didn’t want to stop. He drove those three kids all the way to the tip of Maine and the tip of Florida. When I questioned Tom, “Why do we have to go all the way to tip of the states?” He said, “Someday they will thank us.” Not one child has thanked us for those trips to this day. In fact Maureen tells anyone who will listen that she was so sick when we took her on the Boston Historical Trail that she almost died and how her Dad made go all the way to the end.