Throwback Thursday

[cakmpls]

These are the railroad tracks that ran by our house in Garden Grove, California, where we lived 1955-64. When I was taking Patrick to work the other day, we heard a train whistle, a ways off. I was telling Patrick how evocative a train whistle is for me. It was much louder when trains passed our house--I sometimes awoke in the night, scared awake

Comments

[sartorias]

The mournful wail of a train also reaches way back into my memory, when I was one and two and stayed at my grandmother's.

[pameladean]

We could hear trains from the places I lived until I was eight, but never so close that they were frightening or woke us up if we weren't awake already. Sometimes I would try to stay awake so that I could hear them.

Raphael and I once took a trail somewhere in the Minnesota National Wildlife Refuge that was essentially a disused railroad track; we were looking for white lady-slipper orchids, which we didn't find, but walking along the train track was intensely nostalgic.

P.

[dreamshark]

Sweet entry. I love train tracks and train whistles too. The sound of train whistles drifting over the hills in our small town in upstate New York was actually a lot more evocative than the blaring horn and train roar right by Toonerville (my old house in South Minneapolis). But I didn't mind the noise. I sometimes wonder if I had a hidden memory from infancy of the trains in Oak Hall Station, which I think ran very close to our house in Pennsylvania. We moved from there before I was 2 and I have no conscious memory of the place.