Colorado | Three.
This past week I lived on a street in Wyoming called Cloud Mesa. When we first pulled onto the street claiming to be a cloud table I thought to myself how out of the ordinary a Spanish word in a street name had become. All the streets in Wyoming have hilariously blatantly descriptive names like, "Big Sky" or "Mountain View." When the sun began to set I understood why Cloud Mesa was named as such. It seemed the clouds overhead could be touched if I jumped high enough. Then looking off toward the horizon I saw clouds bunching closer together and to the horizon as if to sit and stay for a while. The sun setting created a golden glow around the edges of the clump closest to the ball of fire and then a bright pink hue to the surrounding bundles. The sky really does seem bigger in Wyoming.
The Cloud Mesa subdivision was near a train track. Trains would frequently chug along pulling various things. One time it was large shipping crates, another time ginormous blades for the tall white windmills generating power. The trains would pass with the clicking of the wheels over tracks and the long, reverberating sound of the horn. It is a comforting sound. When I was growing up, every summer for a week my family would have Cousins Camp at a beach house. We ate good food, played lots of games, swam in the ocean, and tracked massive amounts of sand and sticky marshmallow hands into the house. The beach house was directly across the street from a train track, so many times I would be awaken by the sound of the horn and the rattling of windows. Sometimes it was annoying, but it was also familiar as I laid beneath plaid sheets in the bunk room.
The last month I was in South Africa I lived in Cape Town three blocks from a train station. We took the yellow, graffitied train cars everywhere. To Muizenberg to surf, to the city for Motherload coffee, to Kalk Bay for cute shops. The sound of trains became the sound of adventure and good coffee and better people. My roommate this week grew up next to the sound of trains and was telling me stories of the trains near her home in North Carolina as we pulled into Cloud Mesa. We both stared at the long, passing rectangles one after another in a trance. It's funny how something so simple like having a train near a home makes it feel comfortable. My roommate and I watched the trains, soaked up the big sky on walks, and breathed in with delight the foggy morning. Everything on Cloud Mesa seemed to stir up memories this week, in a good way. In a way eliciting thankfulness for the miles traveled and the chance to find a safe haven on the way from here to there.
