July microblogging: Sam Gribley, you were my first boyfriend

Yesterday's prompt, which I forgot to address, was to write about a favorite childhood book. My all time favorite book from my pre-teen years was Jean Craighead George's My Side of the Mountain. It's fantastically nerdy, without a shred of fantasy; the tale of a city boy who runs away to the Catskills to live off the land for a year. It sparked all sorts of personal nature study for me, and inspired my early foraging efforts, as I learned about edible wild plants in the area where I grew up. It made me excited about camping and being out in the woods, and probably spurred me on to do things like rappelling and canoeing as I got older.

Now, years later, I discover that this wasn't the only book George wrote about Sam Gribley! I am so getting my hands on these!

Here's some milkweed I came across in West VA, in my cousin's area. No, I did not eat them. Yes, the pods are edible.