It’s the kind of river that shows up often in books you read as a child,
Wide and significant,
An adventure.
But then you look across the road and there it is,
Full of history, but so very present.
Ordinary and mysterious.
Loud things always affect me.
They fill me
Or they make me feel sick
Or they make me want to curl up and escape.
A train woke me up the other night.
Its horn was so loud that I thought this train was going to come straight in through our open window and split
Us
This house
The world
Apart.
It wasn’t just the horn I heard.
There was a gentle musical sound wrapped around the harshness of the horn. It sounded absolutely heavenly.
Turns out the train wasn’t going through us-
Just beside us, over by the Mississippi.
In the morning, out on the deck,
I listened to a train run by on the same tracks.
I was glad to hear the same thing I’d heard in the night-
the painful loud layer and the beautiful musical layer.
I am glad that I heard the train in the night without seeing it the first time.
If I had seen it, I might have missed the music.
There are layers to be discovered in the Unseen.
