Autumn on Scenic Drive <---> post 12

I'm sitting in the sunshine of a mid-afternoon in late November. The sky is a deep blue and the last of the oak leaves glow, lit from behind, with a golden and reddish light. One lone Japanese maple is shining in a red-hots candy palette with a background of hazy blue ridges spreading in an almost surreal IMAX 3-D landscape. Autumn is almost over. We have not stopped enough to enjoy it as we could have. With cutting timber in the surrounding forest this past summer I had no idea exactly how it would affect our view. 

When we got married two autumns ago the forest vista didn't change a great deal as the leaves fell away. The woods opened up here and there, but we lived among many pine trees and huge hardwoods. Springtime would blaze for a few weeks with dogwood blossoms and then our private green view would only become greener and more dense. But this year has been special. The end of summer came and with it so did the road paving crew. For years Patsy had been asking the city to pave Scenic. It has been seventy years ago since fresh pavement had graced this road. Nowadays it looked like a road that had been washed out somewhere in West Virginia. They paved up just past our driveway. Wow, to be able to drive from your carport all the way to the church on asphalt. We felt like we lived on a road, no a highway.

Then autumn came.

Just as the leaves began to change we cut all the undergrowth in the stand of trees from the front of our home to the street. Driving up to the house the view began to change almost everyday. I got out of my truck one day and walking out the trash, I saw a mountain that had been freshly revealed. Street lights and tail lights began to appear at night where there had only been woods. Deer came to play in the front yard."Patsy, we live on a hill." I had a change of perspective of how high we lived. Then came the listing of our house in a realty book: mountain area. I didn't feel like I lived on a mountain these two years. "You turn off 431 onto Cornelia Street. Go over the train tracks. The road's name changes to Scenic Drive. Ours is the first house on the right." Sure I noticed that the road rose a little as I drove home. "Yes we live on Scenic but not the mountain end. We live on the Alabama City end at the beginning of the street."

More lights at night, more mountains broke through from morning till twilight. The autumn color was the greatest display Patsy could ever remember on this “hill.” We took a second anniversary trip to Chattanooga and by accident came down Lookout Mountain by way of Scenic Highway. We wondered: maybe once Scenic stretched from one end of Lookout Mountain to the other which totals ninety plus miles.

Then one afternoon a thought formed: The road changes names at the beginning of our yard because this house is the beginning of the mountain. Just like a fountainhead is the beginning of a river so is this property the beginning of the mountains that stretch to Canada. The dense forest has hidden the awareness of where you really live. 

You live on a MOUNTAIN. 

The beginning of a lookout point. It is time you change your perspective. Thin out the forest so you can see the truth. You live on a mountain surrounded by mountains. Enjoy the view while you live there. Enjoy the changing vistas as autumn gives way to winter. Enjoy the high places that you see which are higher up the mountain. Underbrush may have obscured your view and the fact that you LIVE ON THE MOUNTAIN OF GOD.

12-28-2010 ED. NOTE: God would lead us to another mountain which has an elevation of twice the height of the Scenic home. Where Scenic was leaving my log home of thirty years and moving to my wife's house project — the new house, the as-it-is-house has been the most costly project so far. Wonderful, hard, expensive, designing our heads off, sleeping on floors with boxes draped in quilts to stay warm, broken foot (still three years later), nail into my foot (still a constant reminder)... Snow still on the ground from a four and a half inch Northeast Alabama very rare Christmas Day snow that was supposed to be on flurries. I miss the house on Scenic. I miss my log house, still unsold but rented. God You are amazing!