Eventually everyone goes their own way of course.
The road spilled out before me, the way forward hidden between twists and turns.
Each night of our five -night derailment, when the hot sun went down, we’d go and sit on the still-warm tracks with a crazed old railway fettler who had befriended us.
Mum was a practical woman. She expressed her love through deeds. Tender words and demonstrative affection weren’t her strong suit. Particularly at home.
Mum was fiddling with the dial, but the glitchy radio was not getting her urgency—pure static.
It’d be almost another year of blasting it out on repeat though til the song actually got into my bones, got in there so deeply, that it took me by the hand and transported me into my new life.
I remember one Bible belter with a velveteen voice telling us: “Jesus doesn’t need your money, but if I’m going to spread his word, I sure do”.
But now I was almost nine years at the plant, and that novel was in a box in the closet, kept company by two others I’d gone on to write. The plant had become quicksand.
Cars may come and go but some you never forget.
If you listened hard enough, you could almost hear the echoes of Grace Slick wailing her backup vocals in her white tasseled top and her funked out hair.