Standard Time

 

Photo by me, November 2025.

Radiohead's Daydreaming from A Moon Shaped Pool played as we headed west out of Dawsonville, Georgia en-route to Ellijay. We were on a mission to buy apples and cider doughnuts, look at the mountain foliage and maybe, if the weather held, enjoy a hike. I craved the trails and the smell of fall. It was not looking good for the weather, light rain was on the radar to the west and clouds were banking up against the Appalachians. The weather models had said not to worry that the weather would hold until evening, but reality was not looking so favorable. The trees were putting on their best show, much better than last weekend when we were up here and the leaves were weak with color that looked like dried pea soup.

I was digging my head out of reading David Foster Wallace essays. People have made so many moral judgments about him since his suicide in 2008 and one-sided details of his personal life were revealed that his writing has fallen out of favor. People put others on pedestals and realize that they should not have done so and topple them. Or could it be they learned that people are complicated and imperfect? The time had changed or fallen back one hour. Standard time arrived and it is my preferred time with early sunsets and longer nights when daylight no longer needs to be saved. Standard time should be permanent time.

Decks Dark played.

Radiohead has been one of my favorite bands since the magical period of music in the early 1990s. I first saw Thom Yorke on MTV in Creep with his short, bleached hair and looking oddly sexy. He smoldered. My desire for him was like Cobain in that I could never tell if I only found him attractive from certain angles or if my attraction was fooled by the hairstyle. Yorke's physical beauty has not aged well since and “sexy” would not be a word I would apply to him in his late fifties. He is five years older than me, but I never had sexiness to lose and I was also never a rockstar.

 

Photo by me, November 2025.

The countryside unfurled on the twisty Georgia Highway 52 that is married to the southern border of the Chattahoochee National Forest. The first raindrops smacked the windshield as we passed the sunflower farm that we visited five years ago when COVID-19 was still the threat du jour and people were masked outdoors. It felt silly even then to be outdoors in a mask, but I was pragmatic, responsible as adults should be and fearful. I would not even eat inside a restaurant until the summer of 2022. It feels so much longer than only three years ago.

 

Photo by me, November 2025.

Clouds rolled over the mountains. We passed the turn to Mt. Oglethorpe. I was still hopeful about the weather. Three years ago in a mask felt more distant than the clouds atop the mountain and the early 90s. Getting older and standard time is the past disordered, out of sync, scattered memories mixed up on the floor and leaves on the ground. Life is a straight line, but the human mind is nonlinear.

Ful Stop played.

 

Photo by me, November 2025.

We stopped at the first apple place we saw. It was comically painted red, white and blue. It was photogenic in the drizzle and temperatures in the upper forties. Gray weather and gray times. In the gravel lot in my Columbia fleece, Mexican made Levi's jeans and American made Brooks running shoes I tried to connect apples to the American flag theme. No signal in my head and I shrugged it off. The rain kept the crowds low or back closer to Atlanta in the exposed bulb lit food halls selling craft beer and noodles. We went inside for apples. This was not our regular place that we visit every fall, but new things were needed. Piles of apples looked at us and the disappointment was simultaneous between us. We were of one mind and turned and left without apples. We would buy them down the road. 

 

Photo by me, November 2025.

The sky sagged. It was loaded with rain. A model failure and the rain unleashed on us. Knobs were adjusted to warm the car. Rain streaked windows and the hope for a hike drained. The cold and dim world closed in around our capsule of warmth. At least the leaves were pretty and we had apples. The Cartecay River appeared out of the trees next to the car. Someone told me once it had the cleanest water in the state, but I do not know if that is true. What is the truth from a stranger's mouth and what is false? It is okay to not know everything and it is okay not to believe everything too.

The Numbers played.

When will the next Radiohead album be released? A Moon Shaped Pool came out in 2016. It is not that fans will forget the band or that I imagine the band being worried that they need to release an album to stay relevant, but I would like to hear some new music from them. They challenge my ears, stimulate me, sometimes depress me and they never have bored me.

They are the only rock band that I do not mind maintaining an active, albeit slower, career into their older years. I do not see them as an embarrassment to still be on stage on a tour around the world. The band is not a cashing in, nostalgia act like the Rolling Stones or those other bands from the sixties, seventies and eighties. Radiohead's music always seems to stay new and maybe that is because the music has been ahead of everyone else their entire career and we still have not caught up.

Photo by me, November 2025.

Present Tense played.

Internet rumors are out there that a new album is coming, sometime, possibly in 2026. The band is beginning a limited European tour this month going into December. The shows are sold out. I am ready for new music from the band who is possibly the only band who would excite me to hear a new album. Nine years in my mixed-up memories have passed since the band's last album. I was younger, still not sexy, was spending a lot of time in Grant Park, hiking, swimming, dancing and buying apples in the mountains.

Ellijay, cradled by the ridges, sat in the pouring rain. We circled downtown. Tourists dashed for doors and warm tables. We debated whether to eat or leave in the early mountain darkness. I said something about the 80s and coming through here when it was nothing. I noticed that I am saying stuff like that too often the older I get. “When it was nothing” or “when it was cheaper” or “when it was different” and sometimes “when it was better.” My mother smiled in my mind around 1990 and took a bite of an apple behind her big sunglasses. I held the camera into 1991. Tom Cochrane's Life is a Highway was fun with the windows down.  My mother was funny, easy to be around and I missed her. The present or the past, the carousel of memories was the same on standard time. We retraced our miles home down the highway in the falling leaves.

 

True Love Waits played. 

Me in the fall of 1990 around Ellijay. I am glad I gave up on the mustache.

More Seasoned

 

A painting by gay painter Glyn Philpot of his friend and sometimes model Jan Erland in 1933. This painting fits my autumnal mood as it drizzles outside and I am tucked away upstairs in my office with lamps glowing on the corners of my desk. I enjoy Jan's serious gaze, the hand gripping the barrel of the rifle and the dangling booted foot of the crossed leg. The model is obviously gay too, but there is plenty of dangerous masculine potential like the rifle.

 

On Monday I pulled out an umbrella and walked to the end of the driveway to the mailbox. Oak leaves were scattered on the grass and I had to get out in the rain instead of only watching it through the windows. We have had so little rain since August. During my short walk under the tapping raindrops with temperatures in the forties I turned over in my mind a topic I have been thinking of for the last couple of months. I have been thinking about camping and it resurfaced when I was in the mountains of Rabun County last weekend. 

The teacher who founded Foxfire. Image from a 1974 documentary produced by McGraw-Hill.

 

I passed by Foxfire on Black Rock Mountain too and it reminded me of what happened to its founder at the Rabun Gap-Nacoochee School and the scandal in the early 1990s that time has forgot, but that is a story for another day.

 

My camping gear has sat stowed away on a shelf in the garage for the last four years without being used. I have been too busy with the house, I have been too busy writing, I have been traveling, I have allowed life to get in the way. It hit me, it is very likely I will not go camping again in my lifetime. For most people that would be okay, but it made me sad. It was part of a more significant realization too.

My brother, my grandfather and me at Lake Allatoona in the late 1970s.

I camped as a child in the seventies at Lake Allatoona, then camped in my tree house at home and camped in a tent in the woods behind my house in the eighties. I camped as an adult in various places in the mountains. I loved sleeping outdoors to the sounds of nature and a crackling fire and that smoky, rustic scent that only a campfire emits. Now getting older or more seasoned by time, I realize that my body would be less enthusiastic and agreeable about sleeping on the ground or a cot. I could still do it, but I would probably not enjoy it. I realize my limitations that have begun to settle in over the last year. With aging, I am in my early fifties; it is natural that there are activities and places that you will never do or see again. It is not from a lack of desire but more of a result of practicality. Aging has not bothered me too much, but never going camping again bothers me.

 

I do not want to camp in an RV, that is not camping but driving an ugly, gas guzzling motel room on wheels. True camping involves a tent or a tarp or just a sleeping bag. It means not sliding between Egyptian cotton sheets and not using electricity to keep yourself from becoming bored or to make a pot of coffee. It means using a fire to cook meals, heat water, to see after nightfall and to keep warm. Camping means putting the modern noise away and to stop existing as an overstimulated human zombie.

 

My tent and one of my bikes when camping in the Bankhead National Forest in Alabama. Photo by me, 2010.

Also I consider the decline of society as civil norms breakdown and I read of horror stories of how camping has changed. Consideration and respect for others in public has been stomped out under heel like a dying fire and unfortunately that is not exclusive to camping. The experience of camping is not the same with people using camping as an excuse to get drunk and party, bring loud untrained pets, drag along loud electrical generators and impinge on the solitude and peacefulness of nature. What's the point of going into the woods if it is louder and more disturbing sleeping near rude and messy strangers than staying at home?

The only viable option I could see is hiking in for miles and doing back country camping. The likelihood of that also remains low. My camping gear will stare at me in my garage tempting me for some time longer and for as long as I can I will continue day hiking and sleeping at home.

 

Photo by me, September 2025.

Happy Halloween from Lula, Georgia and in the spirit of the time, Camille Saint-Saens' Danse Macabre.

 

Secret Falls

 

Somewhere in the Georgia mountains. Photo by me, October 2024.

In typical fashion, the last week of October near Halloween is when I drive up to the mountains of Georgia or North Carolina to see the peak leaf color, go for a hike and buy locally grown Georgia apples and apple cider doughnuts. These are trips I have been making since the 1980s.

One of my destinations in October 2024 was a little known waterfall that I had found in a hiking book from the 1990s. There are many waterfalls in the Georgia mountains and in the fall, the mountain trails are crowded, especially on weekends. I call it the tourist circuit in which metro Atlanta residents drive up to the mountains, fill up the trailheads and huff and puff through the woods for a selfie in front of the water falling over the rocks. The peace I associate with the mountains is nonexistent during fall weekends and the last thing I want to do is listen to people drowning out the sounds of nature.

To help prevent this location from falling victim to the overcrowding of the tourist circuit, I am not going to name this waterfall or its specific location. There is very little information on the internet about this trail and waterfall and I do not want to contribute to it being overrun like most every other place.

The snaky road with sneaky curves. Photo by me, October 2024.

To hunt down this waterfall and lightly traveled trail which I feared might be overgrown, you drive a twisting and narrow two lane state road into the Chattahoochee National Forest. After passing over the tops of ridges for many miles there is another turn onto an even more narrow and curvy road that follows a gap between the ridges. Several miles down this road and following directions from thirty years ago we turned again down a gravel and mud Forest Service road. There were no signs indicating there was a trail or waterfall to be found. The road was in decent shape for an unpaved Forest Service road given that it was only a month since Hurricane Helene had barreled through the mountains and caused so much destruction. Also, you never know what conditions to expect on Forest Service roads as some are more treacherous than others.

Shall we drive this Forest Service road through a creek? Photo by me, October 2024.

The gravel road followed a creek upstream into a mountain cove for some time before we guessed we had located the trailhead by a small pullover as again there were no signs. 

Tempted by the unmarked path. Photo by me, October 2024.

A trail peeked at us through the brush and we decided to take it with no one else around to tell us that we could be making a mistake. Not that I cared, I was happy to be having an adventure in the woods just as I had since I was a boy. Up the cove we walked between the ridge tops that ranged between 3,200 and 3,400 feet in elevation.

A bigfoot. Nah, just me. Photo October 2024.

We walked for some time as the cove began to close in around us. It was around that time and after trudging through a long muddy stretch that I suspected we might be on the wrong trail or that the directions from a thirty year old book were wrong. I sensed that the person I was with began to question our direction and was hesitant about continuing. I assured him that it was not much further and to keep following the swift moving creek upstream, not that I had any real clue. We were going to find something even if it was a bear and we had earlier heard something crashing through the underbrush and leaves on a ridge above us. Though the thousands of wild black bears in Georgia are mostly afraid of human contact and will run away, I hoped not to test it.

It was the sound of the waterfall in the distance that we heard first and with that, our pace quickened. The boundary of two counties went unseen between our legs as we straddled it.

A place with history under the fallen leaves. Photo by me, October 2024.

The ground leveled out and we were standing in the spot of a former Civilian Conservation Corps camp from the 1930s. From looking around, there were signs that on rare occasion people still used the area to tent camp. Those people too were as lucky as us to know about this almost secret place that on this day we had completely to ourselves.

Some of the old mill ruins from over a hundred years ago. Photo by me, October 2024.

Prior to it becoming a C.C.C. camp almost a hundred years ago, there had been a family mill located just below the falls. A few ruins of the mill were scattered around.

The rooted and rocky trail to the ledge. Photo by me, October 2024.

The waterfall crashed through the foliage and remained hidden from view from the banks of the creek. There were two options to be able to view the falls: wade into the cold October mountain water on slippery rocks or crawl up a rooted, rocky ledge then on hands and knees inch out to the edge. It if had been July or August I would have stripped down and chosen the water route. Since it was almost November and from experience I know how cold mountain streams can be even at the height of summer, I forced my too-old-to-be-doing-this-self up onto the ledge.

Between the mountain laurel the secret waterfall runs. Photo by me, October 2024.

 The view was worth it and was made even more beautiful since we had it to ourselves with no other humans around for miles. There was no line of selfie takers, chatter about lives lived by the glow of a cell phone aimed at the face and no alerts or noise masquerading as music blaring from cheap speakers. This was not an experience to be checked off from a list and forgotten. There was nature as it should be enjoyed with a present mind and a satisfaction of finding its beautiful secrets that has driven me since I was a young boy in the 1970s.

The moon of the mountains nearing Halloween. Photo by me, October 2024.

On the way out of the cove to the gravel road, the weather turned as it does in the mountains like flipping through the pages of an old hiking book. Sunshine became cloudy and would become rain later. Clouds with small cracks between coagulated in the sky with my thoughts, the temperature cooled and the moon signaled from above the limbs that nightfall lurked. Ichabod Crane on a lonely country road entered my thoughts as I looked at the trees leaning over the road. The stories of The Headless Horseman and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow inflamed my imagination as a kid and still I remember the eeriness of that dirt road behind my childhood home as something sinister decades later. Not all of my childhood Halloweens were spent running with untied shoe laces from spooks and birds or hearing my grandmother relay news stories of razor blades hidden in the apples. I suppose there is a little of Washington Irving's characters in me, both Ichabod and Rip Van Winkle, and when in the silent woods on October evenings my imagination taps me on the shoulder.

Photo by me, October 2024.

Where the road meets the trail and forks into our imagination if we are lucky. 

 

The White, Cold Heart of January

A snowy view from the second floor of my house. Photo by me, January 2025.

It was only supposed to be flurries here and it mostly was for over three hours, but the atmosphere was so dry that it became a high ratio snow and it gushed. At the three in the afternoon the snowfall began it was twenty-three degrees with a dewpoint of twelve and those were unusual circumstances to produce snow around here. A typical snow here is one with a high moisture content, produces big and fat flakes, is sloppy, heavy and occurs under conditions with temperatures in the low thirties and dewpoints in the upper twenties to low thirties. Yesterday, the conditions were different with an Arctic airmass in place and the snow was dry and productive. It has been a few years since a snow of this type occurred here and when it does, it creates havoc with quick accumulations that land on roadways turning them quickly into sheets of hard ice.

Photo by me, January 2025.

Photo by me, January 2025.

The storm's arrival at rush hour stranded people on the untreated roads over the hilly terrain of this area. Cars unable to climb these icy hills  were abandoned and if people were close enough to home they walked the remainder of the way. I observed many stunned and bone chilled cold people on foot coming up my hill from the river on a road that has no sidewalks, but plenty of curves.

 

 

If you are a native to northern Georgia, like I am, then you will remember the similar scenario that occurred on January 12, 1982 and it was called SnowJam! I was a couple of months shy of turning nine, but that was a fun storm as a kid and a horror show for adults. In some ways, it is reassuring to think that as much as life has changed in those forty-three years, that we Georgians make getting stuck in the snow a memorable adventure.

Photo by me, January 2025.

Photo by me, January 2025.

 

This was a minor snow here, amounting to an inch, that was a big headache for some. So far this winter, there have been five inches of snow here and within a short period of only eleven days between two storms in the white, cold heart of January. This is above average and compared to the two previous winters there was no snow, not even a flurry.

The cold has been exceptional too. This morning it was eleven degrees here and three degrees above zero in the mountain valley town of Blairsville. The U.S. Forest service stations at Cohutta dropped to six degrees and the one at Brasstown (not to be confused with the state's highest peak, Brasstown Bald) achieved four degrees. The temperature was below freezing here from 6PM Sunday to 1PM Wednesday for a total of sixty-seven straight hours. We reached a high this afternoon of thirty-four for only a couple of hours.

The U.S. snow depth map for January 22, 2025. Courtesy NOAA.

Aside from the cold, the most impressive aspect from a regional perspective was the record breaking snow from the southern tip of Texas, along the Gulf Coast and South Atlantic Coast. For most in the coastal areas this truly was a once in a lifetime storm and in some places it was record shattering.

Today's visible satellite imagery showing the snowfall through southern Alabama, northern Florida, Georgia and South Carolina.

New Orleans received over nine inches breaking a record from 1963 by seven inches.

Mobile, Alabama saw eight inches.

Snow meets beach on the Florida Gulf Coast.

Pensacola Beach, Florida had seven and a half inches.

The small southwest Georgia town of Camilla accumulated eight inches.

Milton, Florida broke the state record for the most snow ever with 8.8 inches.

Savannah reported three inches of snow, but I suspect most of it was probably sleet.

This was a rare storm in that areas further to the south saw more snow than areas of the region to the north. Atlanta's record was not so impressive as it snows there more often than the other places listed. Atlanta broke the daily record  for January 21st from 1983 with 1.1 inches. I was ten at the time and do not have any particular memories of that snow, which was probably more where I lived in the northwest part of the state. We may have called that SnowJam 83! as every snowstorm after 1982 for several years was called SnowJam!

Hidden Mountains

 

Photo by me, March 2024.

 

What can happen in thirteen years? I asked myself that question as I stood in front of the statue of Chief Sawnee in late March of this year for the first time in thirteen years. The simple answer is a lot can happen.

It was in the fifties as I arrived at Sawnee Mountain late in the afternoon and it was a perfect hiking day. It was a day to walk through the past for me as I had been to this mountain once on a warm February Saturday in my younger short sleeved thirties. I was taking a weekend off from writing my novel Shadow's Gravity and had somehow not gained a pound from when I was a younger man. I had gained the weight of more experience, perspective, memories and countless miles on my legs. Thirteen years can do a lot to a person and a person can do a lot in thirteen years. I was writing my fourth book, had moved out of the city for good, renovated a house, nearly died in 2012 and so much more.

Photo by me, March 2024.

Photo by me, March 2024.

I started up Sawnee Mountain through the naked hardwoods that reminded me of where I grew up with a mountain behind my house. My mind wandered from the present at the turn of the trail. I was walking miles of memories as much as I was on the stony trail. The trail curved through the woods as life - to unexpected places, with unexpected experiences and unanticipated questions. Sometimes even in a place and in people we thought we knew there are surprises.

Photo by me, March 2024.

Photo by me, March 2024.

Photo by me, March 2024.

Life and its counterpart death always have a presence in the world underlining our existence in permanent ink and teaching us the seasons of emotion from joy, to regret, patience, shame and pain. One begets the other from the birth announcement to the obituary. Three weeks had passed since someone I was close to as a boy had unexpectedly died. I had spoken at their funeral the following week and they were on my mind. 

 

At the funeral I shared a rambling story of us as boys in the mid 1980s involving him spending the night at my house and us hiking to Elsberry Mountain on a summer Saturday. I talked about how he had to find just the perfect walking stick, how long  that took and how he had to have one because I had one. He was competitive, considered a gifted child like me and in this period of our childhood he kind of looked up to me. Though he is gone, the happy and disappointing memories live on with me and others that knew him. I retraced those memories like a mountain trail which my feet had followed before. 

 

Our lives traveled down very different paths as was the case with so many of the people I knew growing up who became strangers. He and I had not spoken in ten years, but one of our last conversations went for hours through the early morning and past the sunrise. We caught up, we reminisced - we were two boys again who had spent so many years together. I had wanted to include him in one of my novels, I planned it and then thought better of it. It was not that he did not deserve to be in them, he did, but the time was wrong.  He remains a mountain behind my house hidden among the trees unseen at a distance, but breaking the landscape when viewed up close.

The view from the top of Sawnee Mountain looking to the north. Photo by me, March 2024.

The area known as the Indian Seats atop Sawnee Mountain. Photo by me, March 2024.

We took in the view of the mountain before us that summer Saturday so long ago. With sweat in our bangs we gripped our walking sticks unaware then how many mountains we had to climb, how high they would be or how low the valleys between them. I cannot say or understand what he saw that day or in the decades that followed, not long after, he chose one route and I another.

Me atop Sawnee Mountain. March 2024.

Thirteen years or a lifetime, I looked at the horizon with the same pair of eyes which had seen the hidden mountains from faraway and up close. His death hit me harder than I expected, there was a loss of balance at the edge of the rocks and that feeling has stayed with me. He should have seen the view.

 

The clouds moved in, the wind picked up and rain was coming by nightfall. I like storms, without them, nothing grows including people.

All Dressed Up For Christmas

The State Botanical Gardens of Georgia in Athens. Photo by me, December 2022.

Christmas in Georgia is rarely white, but it can be cold as it was last year with lows at my house in the single digits and afternoon highs in the twenties for several days. The cold was refreshing and it made wandering through the state botanical garden light displays in Athens a more festive experience. More commonly it is a cool and cloudy holiday here. This year it will be a wet Christmas with rain expected from late Christmas Eve through the day after Christmas. I would have hated that forecast as a kid, but as an adult I am quite okay with the cozy weather.

 

Dahlonega, Georgia. December 2023.

 

People would likely disagree with me, but last Saturday the 16th in Dahlonega, Georgia the weather was near perfect with heavy drizzle falling and a temperature in the middle forties. I was there to see the lights and browse the shops on the square and so were many others from the crowds and traffic I encountered.

 

Dahlonega, Georgia. December 2023.

Dahlonega, Georgia. December 2023.

Dahlonega, Georgia. December 2023.

Dahlonega, Georgia. December 2023.

Dahlonega, Georgia. December 2023.

The lights were pretty, but not overwhelming. I saw prettier houses on the drive over through the city Gainesville than I did in Dahlonega. The mountain town north of Atlanta and just out of reach from its exurbs has been in the spotlight this year after being mentioned in Southern Living Magazine for the Christmas decorations and events. The mention was picked up by Atlanta television stations and the crowds flocked up Georgia 400. After going, I speculated if it was not some type of paid promotion to drum up tourism in the slowest of all seasons in the Georgia mountains. Had I not seen the stories on the Atlanta news websites, I probably would not have gone. I enjoyed myself, had a good lobster roll from a food truck vendor, but I was not impressed with the lights. Dahlonega is not my favorite mountain town anyway and the shops there are not on par with another mountain town, Blue Ridge.

Dahlonega has an interesting history besides being a former gold mining town, there was a bit of a scandal there in 2017. This story, in the U.K.'s Independent newspaper is quite kooky and worth the read.

Also last weekend I visited one of my favorite towns, Madison, on Sunday.

Madison, Georgia. Photo by me, December 2023.

Madison, Georgia. Photo by me, December 2023.

 

 

Madison, Georgia. Photo by me, December 2023.

Madison is a small town I would feel comfortable living in. It has a charming and refined beauty about its downtown with several good shops and many fine old homes. The people have been friendly on every visit. A shopkeeper remembered me from my previous visits and finally asked if lived there or if I had family that did.

 

Madison, Georgia. Photo by me, December 2023.

Madison, Georgia. Photo by me, December 2023.

Madison, Georgia. Photo by me, December 2023.

Madison, Georgia. Photo by me, December 2023.

 

Some of the shop windows were wonderfully decorated for Christmas.

Madison, Georgia. Photo by me, December 2023.

Madison, Georgia. Photo by me, December 2023.

These are a couple of the many grand homes in Madison decorated for the holidays. The town has the appearance of what people would consider the Old South or antebellum style. 

I have been busy, like most people, dashing to and fro this month. I have been down to Atlanta two or three times during this period.

Phipps Plaza in Atlanta. Photo by me, December 2023.

Santa taking requests at Phipps Plaza in the city.

Sometimes the best way to see Christmas lights and enjoy the sights is to loaf around in the evenings and at night between the planned activities.

Dusk in Bethlehem, Georgia. Photo by me, December 2023.

I pass through the small town of Bethlehem, Georgia once a week. Growing up in Georgia, I remember the annual news story that ran every December on the Atlanta television stations. It was the story of people making the drive to Bethlehem to mail Christmas cards for the Bethlehem postmark. Since mailing cards has declined I suppose people no longer visit the post office there in the numbers as they did decades before.

Photo by me, December 2023.

A nicely decorated home in Monroe, Georgia.

Photo by me, December 2023.

Photo by me, December 2023.

Photo by me, December 2023.

Every small town is all dressed up this time of year with Christmas lights. Monroe, Georgia does a simple but pretty job with their thriving downtown.