The Trains of My Life

What I missed the most when I lived in Hawaii were trains and railroad tracks. They had been part of my life--for all of my life--until I moved away from home. The last place I knew them was in a little Ohio town called Uhrichsville.

My dad, sister and I had moved there when I was a high school senior. We lived in a mobile home that sat parallel to, and perhaps only twenty-five feet away from, railroad tracks. Trains passed all hours of the day and night. Never really annoying, the trains at first seemed a little loud at night. Before long, 'clickety-clack' was as soothing as raindrops on a tin roof--and just as hypnotic.

There was something magical about the tracks as well, and I often walked them to school instead of riding the bus. The town looked different from this vantage point--I could see things not visible from the school bus. And the solitude healed me. Perhaps it was the exercise of walking those few miles to and from school that did the most good.

The railroad tracks were sure, steady, unchanging. They gave me a connection to the past. Mom was gone now, but her history with the railroad tracks lived on inside me--the hobos who ate at her family's table, the dares she surrendered to as she and her friends crawled under moving trains, and the songs about trains.

And they transported my mind into the future. I would leave Ohio one day, that sad place that felt like the end of the earth. I knew it wasn't really the end of the earth, though. Because the tracks kept on going long after my town disappeared.

I live in North Carolina, now. I see an occasional train, cross over the tracks sometimes in town. I miss them, but I'm okay. I can walk the tracks in my mind, and enjoy the trains' clangy comfort in the nighttime of my memories.