Soap Box

In my part of the world, fall usually tends to come on kinda slow.

The lush green on the trees begin it's lazy fade from brilliant to dull, the symphony of the night critters begins it's annual demise, the early evening temperature lends itself to porch sitting, the big yellow school buses traverse their stop-start routes down our little country roads and the Friday night lights illuminate the high school football fields of our country.

The squirrels scurry around the walnut trees gathering up food for the coming winter, the bullfrogs in the big pond at the bottom of the hill rehearse for their swan song and the corn tassels mature and darken, the kernels turn yellow and hard and the long green leaves grow brown and brittle.

This year's calves frolic in the cooling weather and the barn fills up with hay stacked along the walls in long rolls and neighbors start gathering up firewood and anticipating the opening of deer season.

As the surface water cools, the big bass in the pond venture up to be tempted by topwater baits and the blue heron fly from pond to pond getting in those last good days of fishing and multicolored leaves start peeping out from among the late summer green.

The blackberry bushes lose their leaves and dry up bristling with thorns and just dare you to even touch them. The magnolia blossoms whither and fall, and one morning you wake up to find a light frost sparkling in the early morning sun.

And soon the whole world change from the softness of autumn gives way to the hardness of winter, the pastures turn brown, the night song of the tree frogs and katydids goes away and the trees grow bare and stand in stark and gray testament that the gentle part of another year has come and gone.

But winter has its charm and one morning you get up to find that your whole world is covered in a blanket of virgin snow making everything, even the beat up old tin roof on the hay barn, look fresh and new.

Then the snow melts and becomes piles of dirty gray slush on the side of the road, then the temperature drops, the creeks and ponds freeze over and the ice has to be cracked so the horses and cows can get to the water and it's time to start putting out the round bales for the livestock.

Then one day, when it seems the mocking barren landscape has banished the easy days of summer forever, a little yellow daffodil pops its head up and the tips of the limbs on the trees start getting fuzzy and bumpy, as the new leaves prepare to pop out, a carpenter bee buzzes noisily by and you know that spring is well on the way.

Sometimes winter is stubborn and is not dispatched by a few flowers and bees and a few days of warmer weather, I remember one year after the trees and plants had leaves out a heavy frost came along and killed all the new growth and the woods looked like a scene out of a horror movie.

Then it started all over again, the trees shed the black and brought out their bright spring green, the flowers bloomed again and the grass carpeted the pastures again just as if nothing had happened.

How anyone can observe the seasons, the timeless blooming and fading of regenerated life and not believe that nothing but the hand of Almighty God has wrought it all, is beyond me.

What do you think?

Pray for our military, our police and the peace of Jerusalem.

God Bless America

� Charlie Daniels

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