Sweet Southern Comfort

There are a few reasons I hardly ever feel compelled to be sentimental about a tiny town called Jefferson City. This post is not about those reasons. And really, it's not the town's fault anyway. Today though, when it's still muggy and unbearably hot down here in Florida, I am reminded of September in Tennessee. When the last hint of summer is fresh in the air, but you can also smell twinges of autumn creeping through the trees. A few of the leaves will already be changing color, and at night, a sweater might just find it's way out of the closet and onto your back. Had I been there this past weekend, I might have gone to Boomsday, a labor day celebration complete with fireworks and plenty of beer on the river in Knoxville. Carson-Newman would be full of the bustle of students as the new freshman start to feel at home and the older kids invite them to "Dam Parties" (parties by the dam, for those of you who don't get that). The city itself, as I have said before, is small. Not tiny, but smalltown America for sure. It's big enough for McDonald's and Wal-Mart, but small enough that the addition of Blockbuster 4 years ago was a monumental event. I worked at the biggest restaurant in town, Pizza Inn. It was manned mostly by college students, but the actual "adults" that worked there were lifers. I am sure I could go there in 5 years and still see one particular waitress, faithfully waiting on her regulars. But it's a city where folks help each other. Everybody knows everybody, neighbors still watch out for each others kids as they cut across yards to the baseball field. The community pool will be closing soon, it's concrete floors echoing with the laughter of a city of kids, to sit green and stagnant through the winter until it opens again in May, magically blue and sparkling. Perhaps the most sentimental part of this reminiscence is the fact that the child I watched from the time she was a tiny baby is a kindergartener this year. I wasn't there, of course, but I can see her in my mind's eye, standing in front of her house in a new outfit, her lunchbox in hand. She is no longer the tiny tyke I ran through the leaves with in autumn's past, but an independent school-ager. Now I have my own baby, and while I wouldn't trade the scent of his sweet baby skin and hair for that of a thousand autumns in Tennessee, today, I miss them.