Night Sounds

I live very near train tracks. It seems as though a train rumbles by just about every twenty minutes or so, and I take great comfort in hearing them.

I grew up along the banks of the Maumee River in Toledo (on the East Side) and trains regularly rolled along Miami Street as well as down closer to the river. In the summer nights, with the windows open and the curtains lifted into the air by the draw of the fan in my parents' room, I was often awakened by the trains as they followed the river's bend.

Tugboats would also belch their sounds into the deep, dark dead of night as they steered ocean and lake freighters to (or from) their moorings along the riverfront.

I can't help but recall those nights so very, very long ago with every train whistle that sounds, or with the rythmic thump-thump, thump-thump, thump-thump of train wheels passing over a joint in the rails.

There is something about trains, something about rivers that will forever keep days of my youth close to me.

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