(Originally posted on the website Heron Flight)

I live right next to the train tracks. I love to hear the trains rumble by. Freight trains. The house shakes. I can feel the vibrations against the wall. When they barrel through, I wish they would go on for hours. It’s like the pouring rain. There are days when I wish the rain would pour and pour and pour and pour and… I wish the trains were eternal.

Sometimes I imagine what would happen if they jumped the tracks. It would be instantaneous. Think of all that tonnage crashing through the timbers of this house. (Did you know that tonnage had two “n’s”??) The shattering glass. The powdered cement and drywall.

And I, smeared into the earth as a rose petal beneath the thumb of a child. A tiny mite, arched in red across the concrete, without notice.

I tell you, I love the trains.