Back in Time
Sunday, September 21st, 2008
Rumbling track and train whistles carry in on the fall breeze, over the shingled roof and the flag waving beneath me on the front porch. The sun that I’ve written so much about the last few days is the perfect warmth and, as much as I can, I bask in it, feet up on the wooden window sill, the cat playing with strings at the foot of the bed, the trees mostly green but ready to ripen and turn.
The mailbox posts leave deep shadows into the streets. Almost-too-lazy-to-live dandelions poke up in yards that were mowed days ago, and even they have given up on summer. Children play in bedrooms and carry toys from room to room. Their sweet laughter and voices aren’t that dissimilar to bird song on this morning that the even the most cynical part of me would describe as glorious.
Birds swoop above the rooftops and a cat crosses the street devoid of traffic or any visible life. I could step back in time in this ancient town that is still rattled by coal cars, that in most places still smells of livestock, whose downtown district stands on narrow steets laid atop land once scarred with horse and buggy impressions.
This is a town still populated with old white-washed barns with old rusted metal heaped under trees with bare lumber that would easily burn, but just lays in the shade rotting. Country lanes and driveways are still lined with cock-a-burrs that catch in the coats of hunting dogs and cats abandoned in the fields.
There’s an antique airport with big hangars that houses barnstormerd and war planes from the 40s. They fly overhead twice a summer on Saturday mornings for an air show that materializes without any publicity or great marketing. The buzz of the engines fill the out of doors with perpetual buzzing. Even the sidewalks and parked cars hum with engine noise providing all the napping children with soft background music.
These are long days when the weather is like this because they feel as though they have been lived before.
Now, back in the present, the metallic rattle and distant train whistles start up again and run throughout the day, here, every day, but most the people here are not atune to the sensations any more.
The tracks a mile or so away manage to rattle the plumbing and the foundations in the cookie cutter neighborhoods, and sometimes I wish they’d crumble to the ground so we’d have to go back living in a simpler way.
