Time Travel

I hear her long and lonely whistle as I quietly pad across the living room floor in my little apartment;  my insomnia in tune with the sound of her making her way through the dark hours of night to some distant destination.  She makes this journey every morning at this time and like a low,  rumbling alarm clock set to harmonize with my usual fitful sleep, I am as if summoned awake to greet her methodic tones. Nostalgia breaks as if dawn itself.  Taking me back to a time when youth and innocence could literally roam free without any indication of the present world conditions --  so prevalent now -- that was on the horizon then.  I remember as a little girl near Granny and Granddad's old house, there was a train track nearby we kids used as a playground every now and then.  We chucked rocks and poked sticks at the ties and rails, testing their durability.  The shiny steel against my tiny bare feet would be cold as I pretended to be a tight rope walker, arms out to my sides like a misguided plane for balance, my showmanship would be quickly challenged by the other neighborhood kids. We were brazen at the thoughts carried out on those tracks!  Defying the rumbling and warning whistles that signaled her imminent arrival; or the sound of her churning on afterwards, telling us her visit has ended, white smoke dissipating in the cool, gray sky like a wave from a familiar passerby. Were the tracks as white-hot as her velocity ever increased in the shaking earth and trembling window panes? 

Decades later, as I now sit in my well-worn lazy boy, I drift off to a sound sleep, as if in a dream.  I am so exhausted.

{LaShaye LHh}