Based upon his written memories of his childhood, I wrote this story for and about my father, so it is in third person.(Please see below.)

“The world my father and his brothers knew in the first quarter of the twentieth century was a quiet world. The rustling of a bird’s wings as it started from a windowsill by a boy’s head could startle him awake. The twins could lie in tall grass on a summer afternoon and listen to a silence thringing with insects. They could hear, distantly, the mewing of their back screen door, the clap as it swung shut. Walking across the yard at noontime, they could hear chairs being scooted up to the dining table for noonday dinner.”

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This nostalgic story was written by my mother about her childhood experiences with trains. It was published in Mature Living Magazine!

And P.S.

The cover is a collage of sections from her own painting of a train. You see how so many keepsakes of a person or a family can be incorporated in a single project.

“Over the years my cousins and I, balancing like trapeze artists, walked the rails.  We jumped from tie to tie and hung from the trestle as the train thundered above us.  We stood or ran alongside the tracks waving vigorously at the engineer, who thrilled us by tooting his whistle and waving back.  As the train swept past, we slowly came to a halt and gazed longingly and with a wisp of sadness for the far away places we thought we’d never see.”