Friday Night

I’m not sure where this came from but it’s here none the less.  I kinda like it in a way.  It makes nice walking weather at the end of the day.  It’s quiet somehow when it snows.  I heard the sound of a train horn off in the distance as it headed into the south metro.  It’s a lonely sound when you hear it across the farmland and to hear the diesel motor chugging away.

It takes me back to an earlier time when I was a kid laying in bed on a cold winter’s night in southern Iowa.  I’d lay snuggled under the blankets trying to stay warm in a house that was never meant to have insulation. Momma always bought these thermal blankets for us and she said that they were plenty to keep us warm but they didn’t.  My older brothers snapped up the wool Army blankets that Dad brought back with him when he was discharged after World War 2 so they could keep warm.  My little brother and I had to fend for ourselves somehow.

I’d attempt to sneak one of Grandma M’s homemade quilts and put it under the thermal blanket to disguise it.  Momma hated it when I did that.  I hated it worse whenever my oldest sister, the Troll, caught me doing it.  She was such a tattle tale and always wondered why we tormented her.  She’d get revenge on us by turned the shared heat vent for our room and hers so the warm air was only on her side leaving we boys to deal with the cold.

But eventually the bed would warm up as we continued to lay there.  The room air was cool and so were our walls.  I would lay there listening to the trains pull into town and listen as each car went clickety clack across the railroad crossing as I slowly slipped off to sleep on a cold winter’s night.