Spring Time in Georgia
It’s azaleas, dogwoods, jonquils, and magnolias. It’s the reappearance of redbirds and yellow jackets after a cold winter’s hiatus. It’s the smell of grass greening, and the feel of breezes warming for the approach of summer. It’s spring time in Georgia.
Georgia is one of the most beautiful places on earth in the spring. From late March through May every year the good Lord blesses this writer’s home state with an early view of the splendor of heaven’s vestibule. If one spot on earth can be this pretty once a year, one imagines the eternal vistas that must await on the other side.
Spring time in Georgia also brings other things to the surface. Things like exposed flesh, testosterone, and swarms of duly infected “insects” of the human, male variety. Older Georgia men refer to this as the time when the, “sap goes to rising.” Whatever the process actually entails, one thing is for sure - all the young and budding, “Georgia Peaches,” become as vigorously hunted and intensely pursued in the spring as are Georgia white tail buck in the fall.
This was surely the case with one particular fourteen year old, freckle-faced, Georgia male. During his life’s first hormonal epiphany, he slowly began to realize and appreciate the superb creative work that the Lord had been doing since Eve. That appreciation was never greater than during those precious few minutes each day when a neighborhood female passed by his old home place.
Her name escapes remembrance. Her younger sister’s name was Karen. Karen was a high-school contemporary of this writer. There were three daughters in their family. They lived just around the corner in our little community of Riverside.