This is the perfect time of year for enjoying outdoor living spaces and front porches can be just the spot for  socializing with friends and neighbors or just relaxing quietly and enjoying the sights and sounds of nature.

What can you do to make your front porch extra-inviting this year?

Arrange a mixture of seating choices, including colorful pillows, on your porch along with a table to set things on so that you and your guests have a place to set down your cold beverage, book, or cell phone. Live plants are also a nice touch and so many varieties can live happily and carefree on a porch almost year-round here in  N.C. An old-fashioned porch swing is always a fabulous, fun touch.

Dining tables, colorful rugs, and even curtains are popular additions to porches that can expand their use and turn a porch into another room of your house, one that is heated and cooled naturally.

My family and I enjoyed a beautiful day for honoring and remembering our true American heroes at a lovely ceremony held in Historic Oakwood Cemetery’s Field of Honor before a standing-room-only crowd.  The ceremony included music by the NCSU Pipes and Drums, the presentation of colors, laying of the wreath, Taps, and a moving keynote address by General Dan K. McNeill, Retired.

I was able to capture a great video of the presentation of colors by the N.C. Society of the Sons of the American Revolution, Raleigh Chapter Color Guard.

Really!

There are signs of spring everywhere.  The birds are chirping like crazy, there are so many wonderful fragrant scents in the air, and flowers, bushes, and trees are budding and blooming.  Now, if we could just get the local weathermen to cooperate and keep those wintry words out of their forecasts.

Come on.  It’s March already.  In the South.  We’re ready for everything to be covered in yellow pollen, not sleet.