Annis Yard

A head is just a place to hang your coat.

That is, if your father insists that you take a coat with you when you go outside.

I could just see David thinking, "Looks like Joachim is insisting that I am going to have to wear this coat, but I will be able to get away without putting my arms in it."

With all due respect to David, going outside wasn’t in his mind this morning.

David, being less excited than I, could only be enticed down to the tracks with the thoughts of the bag of jelly beans that Bonnie slipped into my pocket.

When I looked out the window from Glen’s house and saw the heavy CPR magnet lifting the ties and putting them into railroad boxes I raced home without tying my shoes, I was so excited to get him down there to see what was going on.

I wouldn’t have known there was so much metal in the Annis Yard without having watched the flat beds of scrap metal, and now a car load of rails being taken off of the ground and shipped away.

The man in the cab had a small list onto which he made a check-mark every time one of those ties was picked up from the ground and loaded.

We might have watched him pick up, drop, re-position and then carry ties into the box car at least twenty times.

On his way back up to the house, David picked his first flower of the spring and gave it to his mom.


Arta