View From The Front Porch-Stan Hitchcock-October 15, 2012

The colors of Autumn are just beginning to touch the Sycamores down by the creek, although the Maple tree by the old farm house is in full bloom of fall, as the leaves start to cascade down in the gentle breeze that is wafting across the porch this morning. It’s my favorite time of year, a time to pause and reflect, and to embrace the change of seasons that is one of the things I love about living in Middle Tennessee. I am a person of weather change, loving to watch the approach of a Summer storm as it darkens up the Western sky, or the first flower of late February or early March to burst forth from the thawing ground down by the spring that runs into our creek, and, of course, the first hint of snow, which usually sends Southerners rushing to the grocery store, as if this region was about to be inundated by the great Blizzard, such as happened last in 1779, when on Christmas day of that year the first party of settlers arrived to find the Cumberland River frozen over so solid that they, and their animals and wagons could cross over. Course, that has never happened since, but who knows….? But, of all these wonderful season changes, the Fall is just the best. The smell of burning leaves starts to keep a hint in the air, the breeze blowing through the drying leaves of the trees makes a different rustling sound, and the grass looses the bright green color it has kept since Spring. The wild animals are more active this time of year, the deer starting to move toward the rutting season, the other animals gathering for winter. And I sit on the front porch and watch it all happen.

 

God bless us all, and deliver us from the Summer doldrums, to freshen for the coming Winter as we move toward surviving one more year.   -Stan