View From the Front Porch- August 23, 2012

As the sun peeks through the trees over the creek, the cool air has cast a spell over the wildlife, especially the , birds, making their songs a little more reserved as the taste of Fall comes early to Tennessee. It's as if they are suddenly reminded that Winter is coming soon and preparations must be tended to, food gathered, nests repaired and fortified against the coming cold for the ones staying for the long haul, while the ones leaving for warmer climes must be gathering their strength for the trip. The Hummingbirds stay an extra bit of time at the feeder, gathering the energy for the long flight to South America, soon the ducks and geese will be forming their V formation, gathering around a leader who will lead them to where they go every Winter, just like the folks from Wisconsin, Michigan and Minnesota head for Florida before the first snow falls. Here at the old Farm House by the creek, as I take my coffee on the chilly front porch, a song keeps running through my mind...over and over. "This World Is Not My Home, I'm just a'passin' through, my treasures are laid up, somewhere beyond the blue, the angels beckon me from Heaven's open door, and I can't feel at home in this world anymore...". I don't know, it must be the taste of Autumn in the air. The shaft of first sunlight, casting a beam of light through the trees and lighting up the hammock in the front yard that we haven't even had time to enjoy all summer, as if to say, "Time to put away foolish things, and get our house in order for the coming change in Season" Another drink of strong coffee to focus me back to the morning ritual, and pushing away the urge to start gathering provisions, cutting wood, picking last garden bounty, putting up hay for the horses, mending fences....things that are in our very inner being, creatures of the Agriculture society in which we were born, and even farther back as hunter/gatherers in some ancient time when it was life or death preparation and the tiny spark of remembrance lodged in our inner selves comes to the forefront and pricks us with just a shadow of a memory that you never lived but somehow remember from the old ones long gone. Hmmmmm....well, the coffee helped bring me back from the deja vu experience....dang, how could I remember experiences that I never lived? Impossible, of course....of course....still, there is that something,,,,y'know, if our blood line can send down facial features, inherited health issues, big ears, eye color...who's to say that memory of ancestors experiences cannot also be sent down the blood line? Memory, the ultimate inheritance.      -Stan