View From The Front Porch-Stan Hitchcock-September 22, 2012

As the sun comes over the mountain, shining down on the Sycamores by the creek, the air is crisp, the birds strangely quiet, the wind utterly still and the sky as clear blue as I've ever seen. A beautiful Tennessee morning that we get this time of year with the changing seasons, and enjoy to the fullest. It was about this time of year, late September 1962, that I first moved to Nashville to pursue a life of music. Leaving Springfield, Missouri, my Ozark home with $50 of borrowed money from friend Warren Stokes. I was driving my 1959 DeSoto, which by the time I arrived in Tennessee reeked of Pig flop from going through a herd of pigs who had decided to settle down for the night in the middle of Highway 60, in the open range portion of the area, just outside of Van Buren, Missouri. At 1AM in the morning I went through them at 75 miles an hour and the experience was about like going over a cliff and landing in a pile of huge rocks, except you had to add in the sound of pigs squealing and me screaming to make the sound track just right of this horror movie. Hitting a herd of pigs is different from hitting a deer or a cow or a possum...the pigs roll up under the car and the resulting chaos is just hard to describe. Had I been driving anything other than a Sherman Tank, which the 59 DeSoto resembled, it would have been lights out for this hillbilly. The car and I survived with hardly anything more than the aforementioned Pig Flop all over and under the car, and the rear end chewed out of my one good pair of underwear from the extreme tightening of my buttocks against the old 59's front seat. This near catastrophe could have made me give up and just head back home to the safety of a regular life....but, no, I was on a quest...onward and upward....Tally Ho.....Full speed ahead...dang the torpedoes.....uhhhh, man what is that smell, whew, pigs do have a distinctive odor and it followed me all the way to Tennessee. Arriving on a hill, on Highway 41 just outside of Nashville, I pulled over and looked at the city spread out before me. It was also a crisp morning that day and Nashville was being heated by coal furnaces which managed to cast a pall over the whole valley, and the Cumberland River, winding through the town, was covered by fog, the surrounding hills were already starting to get some colors in the trees, and I thought it was about the prettiest thing I had ever seen. Somehow, the overnight drive on narrow, winding two lane roads, the fright of pigs flying by my windshield, and the overriding smell....seemed to just vanish in the feeling that I was coming home. Kinda funny way to feel about somewhere you had never lived before, but that was the feeling. That feeling has never gone away, I still feel the closeness of this land of Tennessee, and it may go back to my ancestry of those blood kin that helped settle this Tennessee wilderness in the late 1700's early 1800's, before they moved on farther West, or it may simply be the music in my heart and mind that felt it had finally found its place. Home is where the heart is, and right now my heart is with Denise, on the front porch of the old farm house, watching another glorius sunrise. God bless us all and keep us safe for another day.   -Stan