In the air...

Every morning when I wake up I have a morning routine of opening the door and letting the fresh morning air into our home, or sometimes I steal a moment before Elle-girl wakes up and sit and drink my coffee or tea on our deck.

This morning when I woke up and opened the door I was met with a cool, damp, breeze. The very smell of it, excited me and reminded me that Autumn is just around the corner.

You see where we live, our tiny community has a special signal of sorts they send out for the arrival of Autumn. I like to think of it like this:

About every mile and a half here in this area you will find a tobacco barn. Tobacco is the largest seasonal crop here other than soybeans. So you figure the Farmers being outside all summer, working with the earth, would naturally be the first to sense the changing of the season. So what these farmers here do is about early September they go into their tobacco barns and dig a little hole in the earth, start a little fire, and the smoke rises up through the barn, through their tobacco crop that has been cut and is drying out, and it travels up into the sky. well, if you've ever seen a tobacco barn smoking you'd know you can smell it for miles before you see it! So then the next farmer on down the road receives the message, if you will, and does the same in his barn, and so on and so on. Before long every area within a ten mile radius of this place is perfumed with the smell of cut tobacco.This smell is comparable to a pep rally bonfire, or a warm log on the fire in winter, only much sweeter.

Now I am not a smoker, nor do I plan on becoming one, but I will tell you there is nothing like the smell of waking up first thing in the morning to a crisp cool breeze and the smell of what we like to think of as Autumn coming!