A Crispy Day in Villa Rica

September wings its way in like an eagle, determined and bold. Exciting, new, fresh. The books crack open, the notebooks are clean, the band is playing and the whistles are chirping out on the football field. October hovers near, with its promise of bonfires, the smell of leaves burning, crisp air and apples, fields and parking lots full of pumpkins. Here in the Southland we might have several Indian summers, heck, all the way up to Thanksgiving. So we get the best of it. 

It's a true story that we voluntarily kept our kids at home for 18 years and homeschooled them. At the time, it was considered radical and even weird. We gathered on the porch in the morning and did the pledge of allegiance, sang the national anthem and sometimes other songs (to our neighbors' chagrin -- have you heard Nortons sing?) I got more schooling done in the month of September than I did the rest of the semester. September was honkin' serious. Our kids reveled in the hundreds of acres that surrounded our house, taking every opportunity to suck the marrow out of life after class. The animals turned cartwheels because things were cooling off. Church, family, field trips, wrestling and dancing filled in the other gaps. Don't tell me my kids weren't socialized. It was a wonderful, terrible time. I'm glad we had it.

So here we are, another September. My kids are grown, flying, bearing eaglets of their own, extending their orbits beyond what I could have ever imagined. When the wind blows just right, I hear the band practicing on the other side of town, the drum corps tapping out a cadence. I stop and consider the years, the seasons, the trajectory of life that I have known. Look homeward, angel. But look forward, with hope, to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.