childhood in autumn

One of the differences between my brother and I, while both creators at heart and introverted in different ways, is best illustrated with a scene from our childhood during autumn when we lived in a community of townhouses called I think Harris Pond? in New Hampshire I think. It was while living there that we learned how to bike and had a babysitter named Brittany. I developed a healthy fear of swimming and my brother and I once climbed a mountain that was really a hill near our house.
Anyway so it was Fall and we were interacting with nature in different ways. I have a really visceral memory of my brother trying to collect all the leaves into a huge pile in the backyard field and asked me to help which I halfheartedly started to assist with but lost interest. My mom had said the only real snakes in the Northeast were an especially dangerous and sneaky type who would hide in foliage.
So instead I had been noticing the sap running along cracks in the trunks of trees in our front yard and careful to not get my fingers sticky, gathered the sap onto an acorn, bits of bark, and some pine leaves and things to make baby-Moses-in-a-basket figurine which I left on our front steps for someone discerning to notice later. We both had erected little monuments of value to both of us individually, and were always to be in this way similar but different. Instead of trying to make the biggest leaf pile and possibly encounter a snake I wanted to make something weird out of sap.

When we moved to another house I remember we left little messages surreptitiously for the new tenant, welcoming them and saying different stupid things. In our home in Southborough MA where Oliver had been born we were always trying to explore the 'swamp' in the woods behind the house, and upon finding some firewood, and having had to leave our pet bunny behind in our old house ( who we'd left a dirt mound in our front yard in memory of the night before leaving) we started working continuously on a log/ mud combination hut type habitat for the future bunnies we'd have again one day, behind the shed attached to the house. When it was too cold we'd hose hot water on the mud so we could keep playing.
As the oldest I'm afraid I instigated many of these sort-of-in-hindsight-strange occupations, but many of our inclinations natural as children symbolize more how our minds work rather than the subjects thought about themselves.
We were strange, smart children without too much conflict in our lives, were only bullied marginally once or twice and the offenders were always justly punished. A black boy in my 4th grade class called me 'chink' because someone said I could draw better, and my parents protested and transferred me to a different school. My brother was picked on by a guyfriend, so he gave him a black eye somehow with a tennis racket and we had to transfer private schools. To this day I'm very interested in race issues especially among children, and my brother gradually left sports. What else.. and we also role played being sort of the Pevensie children in Narnia, with my little sister Emily, but we called the place Nomania and our bikes were our horses. Another story.