Hey everyone,One of the biggest positive changes since the move has been the daily dog-walks.
I got nowhere to go
The grave is lazy
He takes our bodies slowly
And I said please
Don't talk about the end
Don't talk about how every little thing goes away
She said, friend, all along
Thought I was learning how to take
How to bend not how to break
How to live not how to cry
But really
I've been learning how to die
You'll remember the old walks. Every day I contemplated the incredible proximity and danger provided by the train yard at the end of my street. I could reach out and touch the trains as they roared past. I flattened millions of pennies on the tracks. I could have stepped in front of every last one of those trains. I jumped out of my skin dozens of times a day as they sounded their whistles. I lamented the location of the castle in the dark winter mornings when the night train would screech through the west end of the city at a walking pace.
It was possibly the loneliest place in the world and I hated it though I went every single day, sometimes twice.
When there were no trains, the fields were desolate and spartan, deserted and dangerous. What used to be the perfect place for Jacob to let Butterfield off his leash to run circles around us was no place for a small blonde girl alone with her laughable fifteen-pound puppy.
There are no freight trains here.
We walk on a lovingly swept and power-washed sidewalk when we are not on a landscaped evergreen path into the woods. We pass big beautiful new houses, admiring the gardens and outdoor decorations. The expansive front porches and custom-built fences, the slate walkways. The neighbors are mostly around, and they say hello. Other people walking their dogs say hello. Children smile. Sometimes people come out and begin conversations. I almost feel as if I'm in a pageant every time I leave the house. Smile and wave. In the prairies I could shrug into my big heavy but not warm jacket and my not-quite-warm-enough boots and wouldn't see another person for miles in the minus thirty degree average winter day. The trains were my company and they never had anything to say.
This is much better. The boys are so happy there are no trains. And I kept one very flat smooth penny, for luck. Or maybe so I don't forget how lucky I am.