It is a cool and most pleasant Saturday morning here in Nashville, the first of what I hope is many to come. Danielle and I are seated outdoors on our porch (aka, concrete slab/carport/driveway) wrought-iron patio furniture. A fly and a bee are buzzing my cup of coffee as I simultaneously swat at them and continue to type. I have yet to eat anything this morning so my stomach is grumbling from both the lack of food and java inundation. I look up to the sight of summer-weary Bradford Pears. A band of titmice and chickadees steal back and forth from the sunflower feeders to hidden perches. Beneath the boughs, in a semi-shaded corner of the backyard sit a small assortment of plants (chrysanthemums, salvia, snapdragons) we recently purchased which have yet to be introduced to the earth. A brand new bag of potting soil lies draped over an old tree stump nearby. They lie in wait. The air is different.

To this very day I am thoroughly at a loss to explain my love for autumn. I suppose it has much to do with the long-awaited - at least by me - diffusion of the sun’s prolonged summer cruelty. If you have read my communiqués for any amount of time you will no doubt recall that I am a subject to climatic conditions. With such predictability, I might as well be under a lab microscope. Pushing as much seasonal cliché aside, this new change of weather energizes me and awakens in me a rush of contentment, that quality of life I so often struggle to embrace. If it requires a weather pattern to jolt me out of disarray, then so be it. That and the thought of having a child…

You see, my wife Danielle is pregnant. She regularly reads to me from a pregnancy book she picked up for $0.25 at a used bookstore in Colorado earlier this summer. With us being soon-to-be-parents, it has been helpful to find out just what in all of creation is taking place inside her petite body. Our little boy (a fact we learned only yesterday) is twenty weeks - roughly halfway - along in this most incredible of blood-and-water processes existing upon the crust of earth. In some ways I feel as though we are merely spectators in an event in which we have little if any bearing upon, and in a way I suppose that is entirely true. But in other ways, as with any historical recollection, it takes two to share a story. To see and confirm that a tiny human being lives, breathes and develops inside the belly of a woman is beyond anything I, or I dare say anyone else, can explain in mere human terms. We use sterile – pardon the insensitive pun - words like DNA, chromosomes, zygotes, sperm, egg, and yet, enveloping all of it, a great Mystery shrouds the goings on of earth. We pretend to make sense of it all in certain fields of expertise among certain circles using curious words we brew up along the way. But to literally see your yet-to-be-born child’s beating heart via ultrasound reeks of the supernatural. By now I realize I, too, am an infant being born again, learning and relearning, pregnant in pause, pregnant with hope, pregnant with child. And it is good.

I will soon hang a new hat upon my head, that of father. The old ways are ending, the new is coming and the eyes of today are finding focus in the soft, still cooing of first breaths. Come one, come all. Bring your glory, bring your shame. Carry yourself or be carried to it. There is good yet to be discovered.