Not an exaggeration to say I'm both a writer and an English teacher b/c of Lloyd Alexander. My 4th grade teacher read to us from The Book of Three every day after lunch, and I was hooked. I wrote to him that year, and he not only replied, he took a 9-year-old's question seriously. (More in alt text)

It's an #aurora, darth!

Asheville, for pete's sake.

I was amazed by how strong the smell was as we were cutting up the limbs, just didn't make the connection about getting the leaves out of the pond earlier!

If I am remembering correctly, they were young leaves, I think it was in late spring. And it was a lot of limbs, big ones, so that the entire pond was covered, though nothing had fallen in such a way as to puncture the pond liner. Not sure if it was the volume of leaves, or that they were new growth

The one thing I did find out the hard way was to never let limbs that fall in a pond stay there. We had bad winds bring down big sections that took 2 days to remove, and the oils in the leaves killed the fish. Did not realize how strong the oils were until then. We could see it floating in the water

That is a never ending job, they just keep coming. We have a lot of big sweet gums, and they are actually great canopy trees, but my mom hates the sweet gum balls! Every year she says its the worst year for them. They are gorgeous in fall!

If you live on the east coast and dont know sweet gum, just walk around in bare feet in spring under trees, when you yell ouch, there is a sweet gum close by!