Day 218 – Locomotive

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218/365 (August 6, 2011) – I’ve loved trains since I was a child. I love the sound of a massive diesel engine, raw power. When we bought our condo years ago, one of the things I loved was that I could often hear the trains when the windows were open.

When I was a child, our family went to the Shuswap every summer (and often at Easter, Thanksgiving, Christmas, etc) as both sets of my Grandparents lived there. My mother’s parents had a fruit orchard (primarily cherries, but also apples, pears, apricots, plums, raspberries, strawberries, etc) a large hayfield, and a massive vegetable garden. My father’s parent’s had a farm (chickens, a few cattle, a few fruit trees, massive vegetable garden) and grew alfalfa. Summer certainly wasn’t lazy. It was filled with picking fruit, making jams, canning fruit and vegetables, shelling peas for freezing. It was hard work for a kid, but it had some pretty good rewards too. All that fresh produce, and usually the hot afternoons were free for swimming in the lake. The trains ran alongside the lake and to get there one had to either cross the tracks, or use the giant culvert installed for beach access. Whenever a train could be heard approaching, lots of kids, including myself, would run up the beach and into that culvert to listen to the massive train rumble overhead a few feet above us. Sometimes we’d put pennies on the tracks and after several hundred cars would rumble past we’d sour the tracks and the weeds along the side of them to find our flattened treasures.