JOY ALONG THE WAY: JOY IN THE MORNING

A sense of autumn is in the air. I smell it first thing in the still shadowy dawn when I step outside to get the daily paper. I am never satisfied with my attempts to describe this season's defining odor. I've tried, saying it is a distillation of squashed walnut hulls, apple bins, dying grasses and curing herbs. But that still doesn't quite catch the sturdy, satisfying fragrance of autumn, the gathering in, the benediction.

This sense of autumn seems to come suddenly. One morning the smell of summer, hollyhocks, hay and hot tomato vines, is still in the air. Next morning there it is, as if the smoke from some Indian Summer campfire has drifted into your space.

Almost simultaneously, one feels the invigorating new temperature. The fever of summer has fallen. Tomorrow maybe a long-sleeved shirt will feel good over the tiresome, tacky tank tops.

On such a morning of change I do not hurry back into the house after finding the morning paper to read about what the City Council is thinking about, or what the Board of Education has done. Even the doings of Congress, state and national, do not interest me enough to keep from sitting a while on the bottom step and holding the gift of a new day close to my heart.

The world around me has not yet awakened. No house lights. No doors opening. I seem to have it all to myself. I can relate to what I want to, not what I have to later.

I see a shadowy creature moving slowly across the yard. A 'possum? A coon? It is only a neighborhood cat. I would like it if it came up to rub its body against my legs and let me stroke its back, but I do not call to it lest I shatter the sweet stillness of the dawn and invade the cat's privacy.

I wonder, idly, what message my daily devotional booklet will have for the day. Will it be any more inspirational than these precious moments I share with the coming of the dawn when I feel at one with the God-designed atoms that manifest themselves as trees, grass, sky, cat.

Soon the light is sufficient for me to see a few words in the headlines of the daily paper -- Housing plans ... Boyd's ... war games ... abducted. I roll the paper up and put the rubber band back on, delaying the moment when I must go in and start relating to mankind. After all, I want mankind to relate to me.

The daily devotional message that day concerned joy. I got the feeling that the author, with cramped wordage to fit a small page, was having trouble with a precise definition of joy, just as I have trouble describing the scent or sensuousness of autumn.

Joy is, of course, defined in the dictionary, but that, too, is in a cramped space and lacks something. C.S. Lewis adds to the attempts to define it by intimating that it lies dormant in our hearts and then it comes suddenly and surprisingly.

Someone has said he couldn't define pornography but he recognized it when he saw it. I can't define joy any better than anyone else, but I surely know it when I feel it.

REJOICE!

~Jean Bell Mosley is an author and longtime columnist for the Southeast Missourian.