One of my favorite hobbies is railfanning – or simply put, I like to watch trains. I am fortunate to live near a Norfolk Southern mainline whereas 50+ freight trains pass through a day. Sometimes I video tape them, sometimes a quick picture with my smartphone. Sometimes I just like to wave at the crew with the hopes I get a tap from the horn! Doesn’t take much to make me smile.
More often than not, I can be found at our local township park on at Saturday morning before sunrise, early enough that the east is beginning to glow a bit and enough it may make for a good photo opportunity, train or no train. Its my favorite time and place to enjoy a mug full of black coffee before I get on with my day. I may mull over the week that is behind me and ponder what the following week may offer. But most importantly, its my time alone, in the quiet, to meditate (until a train comes through, then its showtime!) and to allow God to talk to me and for me to listen. It’s a special time of the week, one I only miss in the rarest of occasions.
Normally, I have found toward the last half of October I get to see the fog roll in. It seems to appear out of no where. I’m on a gradual north-facing slope. I watch a ground-hugging cloud slowly move through, coating the grass with frost as it ambles on northward , through a cornfield and eventually to a low lying area that contains a stream where it stops. The fading green grass turns to glistening glass in a matter of seconds. I’ve watched this work of God multiple times now and it really is something to experience.
Depending on how my morning is going, I may stay for a while and watch the sun make its way over the horizon, casting big long shadows from the nearby maintenance building, the trees on the other side of the tracks, and the phone poles that follow the tracks through the park. At first the frost holds its own but before long as the sun rises higher and higher, the frost begins to burn off, only what is in the shadows remain. Higher above the horizon, the sun shortens the shadows, over-whelms them and the frost is gone, leaving a wet dew.
Having been diagnosed with type 2 Bipolar, a similar occurrence takes place when I cycle into a depressive mood: A low-hanging cloud hovers in, many times out of nowhere, coating everything it touches, and eventually settling into a low area. It remains there until after dawn, the sun is high enough in the sky where it cannot hide in the shadows anymore and is burned away. It gets hard to remember, but the sun will rise and burn it off, It’s a cycle that I have little to no control over, just need to wait for dawn and heat of the sun.
Milepost 81 