Can You Hear the Whistle Blow?

If you squint, it’s possible to imagine a snow-dappled mountain in the background instead of that wide branching tree, and some snow on the ground where the light glints off the parked cars. This scene makes me ache for fall in the mountains, that crisp air, the promise of snow. Follow those tracks out of town, follow them home. When I left New York one October so many years ago, the promise was to drive up to Canada through Vermont for a last goodbye to the leaves and the hills. The people I was traveling with just didnt have the packing thing together, and instead of leaving at the crack o’ dawn, we didn’t roll out of the city til very late afternoon, and the drive through Vermont was made in the dark dead of night. I woke up in the outskirts of Montreal, where we pitched our tents in a heavy rainstorm and saw bits of the World’s Fair as we tromped through the mud and tried to figure out how to cook on a camp stove.