What basic, kid-level fact blew your mind as an adult?

I lived in a desert for most of my life. No snow, and before my recent experience, I'd spent maybe a total of five days of my life in snow, and the snow I was in was incredibly light.

Because of this, I always pictured snow as eternally white and ethereal, like in all of the cartoons

that I'd watched as a kid. I went to spend time with my partner's family back in the Midwest

in early February. I was absolutely enchanted on my first day of the two-week stint. And then I watched

what happened as the snow stayed around, and I got to see black ice and the nasty grey-brown snow blocks on the side of the road.

I suppose I should have known snow got dirty and tracked over and nasty, but I didn't. It robbed the

childhood wonder and whimsy right from under my nose. I was baking a cake in my dorm for my

19th birthday. My friends were running around and being loud, so I yelled at them

to stop because I didn't want them to ruin the cake. They looked at me like I had two heads,

so I had to explain that my siblings and I were always taught that making loud noises or running

around a kitchen when something was baking would make it fall. I was surprised that they'd never

learned that baking rule. Yeah, it turns out that that

was made up to stop kids from running and being loud for a couple of hours when the baking was being

done. I called my mum up to ask her about it, and both she and my grandma were just as shocked as I was

to find out it was a myth. So apparently at least three generations have believed and followed that rule.

My mother used to feed me

dark green lettuce as a salad. I loved it when I was a kid. I think I was 17 and I had a friend over

for dinner and asked my mom for seconds of dark green lettuce. My friend looked at me like I'm a

frickin' idiot. Um, do you mean that spinach? What the F?

Mums had been fooling me my whole life.

In college, my buddy asked me how to spell

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