"Surprise!" How often do we hear that expression when someone painstakingly plans and prepares for a celebration, birthday, anniversary or retirement? Folks do enjoy the expressions of wonder on faces ranging in age from nine-years-old to 99. No matter how many times we experience this, most of us with wide-eyed wonder, love to experience it again and again.
Then, there are those events we know will happen and/or occur with regularity or irregularity and we still have that same look of amazement- that same feeling of something being "brand new." How do we know these events will occur? First, we have documentation and/or second, we have witnessed it.
To what am I referring?
One of the events that occurs on an annual basis recently happened in our tri-county area with thousands of students and school personnel, the beginning of the 2021-22 school year. School is starting, folks will say. There is a scurry to purchase school clothes, school supplies and then the anticipated night of "meet the teacher" events at local schools.
School personnel, community members, students, parents and guardians, again, from nine-years-old to 99, add a little extra pep in their step. As the new school year begins, new dreams, new personalities and perhaps new staff members, new classmates and the talk of "Do you who know who he or she is?" add a positive charge to our lives.
I experienced it not too long ago, as I have experienced each year now for over five decades and now, in fact, closer to six decades, when I began as a first grade student in September of 1964 in the class of the late Virginia Bell at, then, White Springs Elementary on US 41. On Monday, Aug. 9, I walked with the principal, assistant principal and staff members through the halls of Hamilton County Elementary School to hear the excitement for the upcoming school year; still a charge, still an element of surprise. Still a time to "wonder."
Now, we will shift gears, but not too much. The title of this article is: "Around the Banks," but the full title is "Around the Banks of the Suwannee." The Suwannee River made the front page, once again, of the Riverbend News. There was a photo of the river at White Springs taken by Devin Harris that shows the Suwannee out of its banks and covering the steps of the historic springhouse at White Springs. The headline of the Wednesday, Aug. 11, front page article written by Danny Federico, "Rainfall leads to substantial rise in Suwannee River" and accompanied by a great photo by Devin Harris was, once again, familiar, wonderful and yet, a bit surprising. Does this dramatic rise of the Suwannee River happen each year? No, it doesn't. Have we seen it occur before? Yes, we have. Yet, each time it occurs, it brings a new sense of amazement and wonder.
"Surprise!" We know it's going to occur and sometimes we know when it will occur, yet the element of surprise and wonder continues to be seen in the eyes of a young child starting school or an elderly citizen beholding the rising waters of the Suwannee River and launching into a story: "Remember when the river flooded in 1973 or in 1948? There was so much rain."
It's what I love so much about these wonderful, often times familiar and many times surprising events that make our eyes light up!
From the Eight Mile Still on the Woodpecker Route north of White Springs, wishing you a safe and happy week.