Picture This!

Auburn Ag alum Amy Alverson Stephens sent in this awe-inspiring photo of day breaking in the Appalachian foothills. She captured this peaceful, Picture-This!-winning scene from the front porch of her Talladega farm home through the chill and fog of a February morning, but it's a view she wakes up to and savors every morning, a little while before she sets out from Valley View -- a fitting name for her farm -- for her job as agscience teacher at Moody High School. Stephens earned a degree in horticulture from Auburn in 2006 and could have chosen from among several attractive job offers, but all would have meant moving from Talladega and that was something she wasn't willing to do. So it was back to Auburn, where in 2008 she received her master's degree in ag education and went straight to her teaching job at Moody High, located in neighboring St. Clair County. She hopes to add horticulture classes to her curriculum soon, but meanwhile, she still does occasional small-scale designs for homes, and she spends her weekends landscaping her yard, propagating her own plants and tending the pumpkin patch she put in last year. If something about her name rings a bell, it may be the maiden name. She's the niece of Bill Alverson, the College of Ag's retired assistant dean who spent his 32 years at Auburn meeting, greeting and recruiting hundreds, maybe even thousands, of Alabama high-school students, an untold number of whom today are Auburn Ag alumni.