Day 130

When I see railroad tracks I think of childhood, and believe it or not, playing around them. Our house is up on a hill and there are tracks that run along the lake below it, I remember when the trains ran more frequently, several times a day, and when I was a kid I used to go to bed and wait for a train to go by, the rumble would put me to sleep. When my grandparents had a cottage along the lake the tracks were right across the driveway, I mean those trains were close to the house, when a train went by you couldn't hear yourself think! Talk about noise putting you to sleep, if you stayed at the cottage and a train went by in the middle of the night, chances are you would wake up because it sounded like it was coming right through your bedroom.

But the thing that was the most fun, not the smartest thing we ever used to do, was to put pennies on the tracks. We would listen for a train in the distance, hopefully it was way off, but not always, then we would run up to the tracks and lay bunch of pennies on the track for the train to run over and flatten. You had to put a bunch down because once they got run over by the train they would fly everywhere. So after they were flattened we would have to find them among the stones and railroad ties. We would get yelled at every time we did this, I think my Grandmother thought we would get flattened by the train. I still have a couple of those pennies, flat and smooth and super thin. It's one of those fond childhood memories that happened so long ago but seems like yesterday.

"Sweet childish days, that were as long as twenty days are now." -William Wordsworth