WE LOVE WHAT WE LOVE

Oh how I love the train.  Eight times a day, first at 7:02 and last at 9:33 I love the train.  Morning the Southbound, evening the Northbound I love the train.  It's as regular as Mr. Wiggles waiting for his supper.  

Train we took in Alaska

The track runs four miles from my window on the other side of the forest.  Long it whistles, longer it echoes, crossing after crossing as it travels into town (or out).  Not forlorn, not haunting.  Just people traveling from Charlotte to Durham to Raleigh and Washington, perhaps then north to Mystic or Boston.  Ordinary people choosing the rhythm of the train as others have for almost 200 years.  The sound saturates the forest around us, melds with the insects, the frogs, the birds and the scuttling.  Even the trees pulsate as sound ricochets off their canopy and cascades back to earth.  There's nothing disturbing about this tidal wave of noise.  I love it.  

Oh how I love the clamor of the geese.  Each night they pass overhead honking their way in one direction and then in the other.  Again, you could set your clock.  Often in the mornings they settle in our meadow to graze and pluck a few tasty insects. As we drive off for the day, others cause a traffic jam padding across a nearby country road from a pond.  Why are they in sync?  Such communal creatures.

They are the noisiest of waterfowl.  They seem to live for water and sky.  Enviable.  I don't know why I love them, but maybe it's because they seem steady and predictable and, above all, talkative.  I read that they honk to encourage eachother as they fly.  How could we possibly know this?  But it's a lovely idea.  In the air they're a skein, flying in formation.  On the ground more rowdy and undisciplined, thus a gaggle. I don't know that many people who look forward to geese, but I do. 

I have friends who hunt duck and geese and deer.  One also shoots wild boar, elk, and whatever he can. The duck and geese can't be too hard.  After all, their arrival is a raucous event and in a skein you're bound to hit one.  The deer that fill our meadow would be no harder to kill, I dare say, than your pet dog. Still, I'm not a vegetarian so how can I judge?

Complexities aside, this is the good luck of my life--living amongst the machine and the garden.  The sounds of the train, the cacophony of the geese and the beauty of the white-tailed deer.  We love what we love.  What about you?