Lumber train lumbered laden with the dark logs in the rain, the wet rails dull and black like the shadowy hills and I sat waiting and waiting and waiting. The urban tide turned, and it rolled slowly, and we all waited. Windshield wipers off and the world blurred like a stained glass window scene of logging town industry, nothing romantic, no flowers, just grey and brown and black and rain, while headlights and streetlights cast dingy yellow illumination.

Homeless man in drab black clothes shuffled and stamped his feet waiting for the train, cars and truck idled and belched grey plumes, the sewers exhaled steam. The brilliant red traffic light, the brilliant green, the brilliant yellow, the brilliant red again, changes amounting to nothing but a show of lights, an alleviation of the grey, and we all still waited.

Five minutes earlier would have been on time. Five ten fifteen the train gathers speed but it’s one long unbroken chain, a glimpse of each rail car bearing the burden of dead trees, cross-guards flashed at a much faster tempo than the train’s travel. The earth beneath the weight of steel and wet wood rumbled and the rails groaned, and the passage of such a burdened beast is never quiet. And still we waited. The lights changed from red to green to yellow to red again and there, finally, the end of the line, the turn of tide, traffic flowed in a different course.

During my bath last night he brought me loganberry wine in a small glass, and a teakettle, three times, to refresh the heat, and added bath salts, and kissed my forehead. Then I could hear him playing his fiddle in the other room, where the woodstove burned oak logs he had split last summer to make our house warm in winter.
Being with him is the best thing I know.