CREEDE HINSHAW: Rejoicing in the changing of the seasons

On this gorgeous autumn day, I am grateful for the changing of the seasons and grateful for the Lord of the Universe who called creation into being. Although I have never lived in a region where the temperature and weather patterns are predictably the same week after week, month after month, I wouldn’t choose such a setting. Monotony doesn’t appeal to me.

To be sure, when it sizzles in the Georgia August inferno, the allure of a temperate 72 degrees Fahrenheit sounds irresistible. Same for those bitter days of January-February when nights and days can be long and cold. But the yearning for permanent, guaranteed blue sky and shirt-sleeve weather doesn’t last very long.

Give me variety. Give me gorgeous clouds, ugly weather, serene days, thundershowers, misty dawns, frosty window panes and shimmering heat. Give me stiff wind, swaying trees, migrating birds, glorious autumn sunsets. Keep me surprised.

This morning when I walked to the mailbox, the leaves were gently falling, a cool breeze was blowing through my woods, and the skies were deep blue. Last week, the skies had been leaden for an entire week, the sun obscured. The disappearance of last week’s sun made this morning’s brightness even sweeter. I wouldn’t want either tableau forever.

I will enjoy my fire pit tonight, a treat quite unappealing in mid-summer. Twigs from last year’s pruned azaleas will serve as my kindling and fallen branches from throughout the yard and woods will supply the fuel. To sit around that inviting flame, listening to music and musing on life is one of the richest blessings of the fall and winter months.

Particular aromas can magically transport us back to specific times and places; the fragrance of tulip poplar, oak and hickory leaves carries me back to a 5-acre woods near my childhood home. The few saplings in my parents’ yard were hardly mature enough to drop autumn leaves. But Ziegler’s woods beckoned; in the Indiana September and October my brother and I would thrash through the leaves, exploring with abandon. Both the sounds and smells of that now-seemingly magical forest return every fall, though I am more than 60 years removed from that childhood playground.

Winter will soon arrive with its promise of freezing morns and icy days. Although a Georgia winter is nothing like my snowy central Indiana childhood days, there is something bracing and inviting about the clean, clear air and the absence of the stifling humidity.

The occasional winter shiver will remind me to be thankful for the blazing days of August, and although winter nights are rather too long for me, with the arrival of the winter solstice I will rejoice in the gradually lengthening days until next June.

Some writers attribute the natural world to “Mother Nature,” a description antithetical to the Judeo-Christian understanding of the cosmos. We live in a created order. Read Genesis 1-2 again and rejoice that this is our Father’s world.