In springtime, flowers push up from the ground and explode into color, and baby blue tail lizards try to scamper away from the grasp of excited, barefoot little boys. The fine yellow mist of pollen coats everything while big black bumble bees hover lazily, watching as you work out in the yard and daring you to reach out and swat them with the little souvenir baseball bat bought at the Braves game last fall. And it’s kite-flying time.

Spring has sprung. The grass has riz. I wonder where the birdies is.

Is it just me, or did this spring kinda pounce on us when our backs were turned? From freezing to fabulous in a matter of hours. Honestly, it is no exaggeration to say that some of the trees, the Bradford pears especially, bloomed overnight.

Dixie Divas

The new washer and dryer set that arrived to take up residence in my laundry room looks like it was sent over from George and Jane Jetson’s home in the outer galaxy.

Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Isaac being the critical link. Remember he was the young man his father, Abraham, was about to sacrifice on the mount where present day Jerusalem stands. The angel of the Lord stayed the hand of Abraham and preserved the young man’s life. God did this horrific test to determine if Abraham truly would not let anything come between their relationship, not even his one and only son. Sounds like the passion of Christ, doesn’t it?

Hollywood returned to Coweta County Saturday morning. During a day-long shooting session at Riverwood Studios in Senoia, film crews shot a movie trailer for a family film involving the search for Confederate gold. The video shows one of the scenes being staged. If the film is picked up by Hollywood, more shooting would occur in Senoia.

On November 15, Sara Harp Minter Elementary School assistant principal Michael Smith was in the middle of his morning work-out at World Gym in Fayetteville. Smith collapsed, and the staff and fellow gym members responded quickly and used an automatic defibrillator to assist in Smith's treatment before the Fayette County EMS arrived on the scene.

The third son of Edward and Nancy Brown Herndon was Joel Jasper Herndon, born 18 Oct 1829 in Elbert County, Ga. Joel is the only child of Edward and Nancy to have a biography included in "Georgia Memoirs," a book published in 1895. I ran an excerpt from the Memoirs story in an earlier column as it gave much of Joel's life history and some of his heritage. The book may be found at the Coweta Genealogy Library in Grantville as well as at the Georgia Archives. I found one conflict in that Joel's marriage date in the story disagreed with the marriage date in the original marriage book in Meriwether County.

There’s a certain time in your life when you have to put your foot down. You gotta draw a line in the sand and dare the other person to step over it. And sometimes, to keep a smidgen of self-respect, you have to do something drastic. Monday was one of those times.

There seems to be a trend among politicians to name public properties after notable citizens who have not yet left this earth. I believe it is a grave mistake.

There’s going to be a wedding in our family. Abigail, the eldest of our daughter Jean’s bunch, will be getting married on July 14, in Leesburg, Va. The lad she’s marrying is tall, good-looking and has a good job. He has also fended off the urging of his would-be father-in-law, Brian, who met him at the door whenever he came calling, with questions: “What are your intentions toward my daughter?” “What’s the status of this courtship?” and, “Have you set a date yet?”

About a decade ago I made the prediction that the big fight for the very soul of Peachtree City would center on the city’s industrially zoned land.

What we have here is a serious inability for the opposite sexes to understand what is sacred for the other side.

Take for instance, the significance of flowers to women and ballgames to men. Neither side understands why it is important to the other. The matter is further complicated by the human need to understand before we can accept. Due to the serious lack of understanding, these two issues become, without a doubt, the biggest source of constant conflict in the battle of the sexes.

Too often our young people — especially teenagers — correlate matters of faith with some of the most boring subjects in all the land. I see them enter the front doors of the church and immediately dress their countenance with this “doesn’t matter in a hill of beans” look.

I was finally able to get down to the Coweta Superior Court to check out land records and was quite surprised at the number of transactions by Herndons. Although there were no very early transactions as there were in Meriwether, I found an impressive number of them in the mid 1800s and early 1900s. I also found two Herndons unknown to me in very early land transactions - Jeremiah Herndon (land in the 2nd District filed 1828) and John P. Herndon (land in the 6th District filed 1864). Don't have a clue as to who those guys might be.

Once, in a church I served in another state, a young teenage boy secretly smeared human feces on the walls of the men’s restroom several times before he was caught.

With its buying power diminished, a quarter many not seem important to most, but with tax time right around the corner, every quarter is really important to the government.

Amidst the rubbish rolling off the Hollywood production line there is the occasional gem, a surprisingly high quality film or perhaps an important movie that can teach us prized lessons of our humanity if we pay attention. There is such an important movie now playing, titled “300.”

In case you haven’t noticed, Mama has been banished from this column for several weeks.

Have you missed her?

It all started when she, for the first time ever, took exception to a piece I wrote on her crankiness following heart surgery. If I thought she was cranky before the piece, it was nothing compared to what came after that one ran.

Beware! Always beware. That’s the counsel some soothsayer gave Julius Caesar in regard to the coming Ides of March. Well, Caesar didn’t watch all sides and didn’t “beware” enough. March 15 — which we observe tomorrow — Julius Caesar was assassinated by Roman Senators Brutus and Cassius (Remember, “Et tu, Brute?”). It was the year 44 BC. That March 15, 44 BC was our Nov. 22, 1963.

Not that I meant to do it, but I’ve proven that one cannot safely or effectively combine cell phone usage with other routine activities. And I believe it has nothing to do with distraction and everything to do with the fact that the human brain can do only one thing at a time.

There is something wrong in south Fulton. And it’s not the people.

What you are about to read may well upset a few apple carts, though that is not necessarily the intention. My allegiance is to the residents of south Fulton, the diamond of metro Atlanta, not to any party or its representatives. And what follows is the beginning, not the end.

I keep driving back and forth between Newnan and Greenville, trying to gather as many court records as possible on the family of Edward and Nancy Brown Herndon. They lived predominantly in one area but that area straddled two counties. Later, Preston branched out on his own and moved way out towards Powers Crossroads near the Heard County line. But, for the most part, the Herndons spread out in an area roughly between Senoia and Haralson in Coweta and Alvaton in Meriwether.

I had just taken my seat, number 2C, aboard Airtran Flight 569 from Bloomington, Ill., to Atlanta. The day was cold but clear and the sunset was but moments away in a near cloudless sky. I paid the upgrade of $40 for a business class seat because I wanted to read and relax after a busy two days in Champaign where I am helping to start a new church.

My mama was born in the great state of Alabama. She lived there all her life, until she married my dad, that is, then she moved to Georgia. I guess that makes her about as Southern as one can git.

Dateline Enterprise, Alabama: the most powerful man in the world, President George W. Bush, tours the devastation in the aftermath of a deadly tornado that flattens a high school and takes precious young lives.

Gone. It was gone. Two hours of work – gone.

My editor at Fayette Woman had challenged me on matters of punctuation, possessive plurals specifically, and I took the bait. She gave me one more chance to get it right by letting me proofread it myself.

We are very fortunate to have many records to document the births and, in some cases, deaths, of members of this family. Since Edward's great-great granddaughter, Nell O'Shields, persevered and tracked down her great-grandfather's Bible (Preston Herndon) and put it together with handwritten notes left behind by her grandmother, Ethel Ona Herndon Gullatt, we can be reasonably certain that these dates are correct.

Several months ago, a well-known, influential and prominent pastor was accused of drug use and sexual immorality. The minister, who was president of the National Association of Evangelicals, an organization representing some 30 million Christians, was the founding pastor of a church whose ranks had swelled to a phenomenal 14,000 members. The pastor resigned as NAE president and, eventually, was removed from his pulpit and the ministry.

Men and women are different – plain and simple. We look different; we talk different; we listen to the same conversation, but yet hear things differently.

When an experience is shared it is magnified. I’ve written often of our travels, especially in Europe, and people tell me they appreciate my sharing because they too love the continent’s antiquities, or famous art galleries, or its music.