Swaying in the Breeze
There’s an old abandoned Illinois Central railroad spur that once serviced the Freeman Spur coal mine. Most of the rail bed has nearly disappeared into the woods, but the old trestle bridge is still there.
People ride motorcycles and ATVs across it, and every now and then some really daring farmer will take a small tractor over it.
The day my wife and I went out there was hot. Very hot. The kind of day where the air just sits there and doesn’t move.
So naturally, we decided an old abandoned rail bed surrounded by head-high weeds and trees sounded like a fine place to spend the afternoon.
We drove most of the way down what looked like a one-way rail bed. As it turned out, that’s pretty much exactly what it was. Eventually, we came to the old trestle bridge and decided we were going to try walking across it.
Looking back, walking across that thing probably wasn’t one of our smarter ideas. Neither one of us recommends trying it.
And yet, there we were.
Farmers had laid old planks across the bridge, and once we got out on them, the breeze started picking up. It felt better than the dead air we had been standing in earlier, even if the wind itself was still hot.
A few of those loose boards got our attention, and the wind wasn’t exactly helping matters. Somehow, we still kept our phones in our hands recording the whole thing. When we got to the other side, we wandered around for a while taking pictures and looking the place over.
That’s when I noticed the wildflowers.
The wind had them dancing back and forth like the heat didn’t bother them a bit. They were just out there growing along that long-forgotten rail bed, going whichever way the wind took them.
We took loads of pictures that day and enjoyed being out there together. It was one of those places that felt like it had been left behind by just about everybody else.
Eventually, it was time to head back.
My wife and I walked side by side across that old bridge, leaning one way and then the other whenever the wind got hold of us. I guess we weren’t much different from those wildflowers on the other side.
Just swaying in the breeze.
