Home on the Trains

“…And behold, as I pull this cloth from beneath the crystal and the china, in a flash! Every piece will stay intact, before your very eyes! And a one, two three…” A grassy gingham table cloth, captured mid-whip, as some vast, ethereal, velvet waist-coated magician performs to an unseen audience. Precariously, the cloth landscape holds its contents in flux, and stands on ceremony, glorious but jumbled, tentatively awaiting applause.

Flexing squares brace interlocking rectangles in a tufty, bird-pecked patchwork. Telegraph wires and electric fences guillotine the view into structure, while, behind, blossoming clouds billow out, like a child’s handwriting, innocently straying outside the lines.

As the speed picks up, eventually only smeared beams slur past the scratchy porthole- charcoal, misty dust, brown, brown, browner, quiet green, musty blue, and finally, bright. A train ride rainbow.

In the mild and towering distance, the audience beams- it’s a decorous ovation. It’s for the crowds of mottled cows, struck parallel like iron filings, it’s for the hotch-potched fields and mismatched walls, it’s for all the smirking quirks, the nonchalant oddities- it’s for our green and pleasantly surprising land.