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S P O R T I N G C L A S S I C S • 15 I know it's March, the greening season, and time for renewal. It'll be a while coming yet in the north and west, but winter's gruff countenance is, day-by-day, begrudgingly giving way to the smile and fair grace of spring. Down South, deep in Dixie, the dogwoods are pregnant with buds that soon will burst with the chaste, four-pedaled resurrection blossoms that so beautifully reconsecrate the woodlands. And Old Mister Longbeard, with the arrival of each more glorious new dawning, will thunder his applause and ardor from hillside and hollow. It's time for new life, a time to fall newly in love with living, to look around you—at all of wild and wood—and rediscover again the contagious joy of being alive. And I do love it well. For it is a grand and goodly thing. But for spring, the advancing vagaries of aging, once September decays to December, might muck us in self-pity. Autumn, lovely and mellow as it is, forces us—more overwhelmingly with its every passing—to acknowledge and accept the limits of our mortality; the dark and despairing weight of a cold, wet, and blustery wintry midnight, skeletal shadows of the bare trees black and soaked outside the window, their bony fingers scraping against the hoary panes can be like someone walking prematurely over our grave; while spring frolics forth in her bright green frock and bonnet, sending spirits soaring from the bottomlands of depression to blue, cloudless skies and sunlit reassurance that life, while we have it, is so wonderfully worth the living. For all of that, it takes me a few weeks to gather its rhythm. I'm a hard time getting past November. Seems with each fleeting year, the more. For I love its season more than any other. I love its mellow mood, the honesty and humility it brings me to feel, the things it brings me to know about myself, the emotions it inspires in so many affecting and wonderful colors. Depending upon where you live in the northern hemisphere, its complement may be September or October, but whichever, it's properly spelled "p-e-r-f-e-c-t-i-o-n." Here, it's November, letting me know I've survived to this fine annual intersection of life and living once again, bringing so many wonderful things that I love: hunting seasons, upland and marsh; blues in the surf; stripers in First Light by Mike gaddis EvEry man of dEcEnt sEntimEnt should lEavE his pErsonal summation of his days on Earth. the chilling waters of the bay; walks in the woods; the rustle of leaves under my feet; crystal days and obsidian nights; the magic of your breath on the air; the bay of a hound distantly in the dark; first frosts; muscadines hiding cold and sweet beneath the leaf mold; sweet cornbread in a Dutch oven by the fire; a tired bird dog by chairside; the burn and warmth of a good malt; the memory of a perfect day, a perfect yesterday, the promise of yet another, tomorrow. Thanksgiving. An old family farmhouse filled with laughter and folks you love and reeking to the rafters with roasted harvest frankincense. A table groaning with blessings and thankfulness. The thought—of thankfulness—that there can never be enough. And how you wish, Dear God . . . you could slow it all down and make it last clean through 'til next year . . . 'til, Pray Lord, you'll still be here, and it'll come again. For you, as me, I'll wager, November is the la hauteur de la Soul of autumn. Its richly distilled, soulful height. I love it all more than I know how to say; my best words at the effort rest as no more than fallen leaves upon the surface of the well. Though I can tell you how to really feel it, to Man with his Dog before a hearth by beNJaMiN West CLiNediNst Courtesy heritage auCtioNs/WWW.ha.CoM