Letterboxing~Leaf Monsters

As most of my readers are probably aware, I'm an outside-gal. I love to be outside, hiking, exploring, horse-back riding, playing with my kids and animals, camping, and Letterboxing.

Autumn is one of my favorite times of year. I enjoy seeing the trees turn color and think it's fun to walk over the fallen leaves listening to the crunch-crunch sound.

Everyone in my family seems to enjoy this seasonal pastime, too. Except for my daughter.

She's afraid of leaves.

As some of you know, my daughter suffers from OCD and Aspergers/High Functioning Autism. One of the symptoms seems to be latching onto irrational fears. She's 'chosen' leaves.
She's been afraid of leaves on the ground, moving around, and leaves on the trail, that might brush her skin, for as long as I can remember. She's not just a little bit afraid. She's terrified and will go into a panic even thinking about touching a leaf.

It's good we don't live back east anymore, where trees with leaves number in the thousands. And raking leaves into piles, for kids to jump into and play in, is as normal and common experience for all children every Autumn.

For her leaves are nothing to be messed around with. The bigger the leaf, the more horrible it must be, waiting to gnash it's teeth and carry my daughter away.

So, as you can imagine, including my daughter in Fall hiking, camping and Letterboxing trips can be quite the challenge. She loves to be a part of everything we do, though, so I try to bring her along at most opportunities. Except It usually means I become a pack mule. But if my sons are along, they generously help carry their leaf-challenged sister, to give my aching back a break.

My neighbor friend, Val, over at Fantastyk Voyage and I recently drove down about 40 mins south to the Manzano Mountains, Fourth of July Canyon to search for a letterbox placed there. Jenna tagged along, too.

All the leaves had fallen off the trees. There were alot of dead, crunchy leaves on the ground.
Here's Val on the leaf-covered trail.


Val wrote up a wonderful post on our Fall letterboxing adventures, with some lovely photos, too. You can see them on her Lost in Fallen Leaves post.

We located the letterbox, as well as a Hitchhiker box nearby, too. (We relocated it to the Quarri letterbox location, after we left Fourth of July Canyon) We stamped in with the cleverly created, and pretty stamp, made some leaf rubbings (just Val and I, of course), and enjoyed the nature and the sound of the wind in the trees.




As you can rightly imagine, Jenna was not about to set one foot on the ground.



For more info on Letterboxing.