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All of my writing is intended for adults over the age of 18 ONLY. Stories may contain strong or even extreme sexual content. All people and events depicted are fictional and any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental. Actions, situations, and responses are fictional ONLY and should not be attempted in real life.

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The most depressing thing about my grandmother’s death was that she had outlived all of her children and three of her grandchildren. I guess that’s the price you pay for living to one hundred and eight.

My mother was a very late-in-life baby. She was born when grandma was forty-four. She said it was hard growing up because grandpa– her dad– had died in a farm accident just before she was born and all her siblings were grown up with families of their own by then. So, it was just her and grandma out on the farm by themselves.

When she told me that story, I was never sure if it was to tell me that she understood my loneliness– the only father I knew was a tombstone in the local military cemetery– or she was asking me to understand her own emptiness. In any case, mom had to work and I spent a lot of time out on the farm with grandma.

I was born when mom was forty-two. That means my grandmother was eighty-six when I was born. She still worked the farm she had inherited from her parents. Actually, for most of my life, she rented it out for crop share and only supervised things at planting and harvest. I don’t know how much actual supervision she did, but I remember her and me sitting out in the pickup watching the tractors as they planted or the combines when they harvested. They took grandma’s license away when she was ninety-seven, but she still drove around on the farm to watch the planting and harvest.

I stopped going out to the farm once I got to high school, but after mom passed away from breast cancer, I started going back again. I kept telling myself it was my duty as family to go see her, but the reality was I got more out of our visits than she did.

When I was a little girl, I once asked her if she was lonely out there on the farm all by herself. The farm was fifteen miles from town and the closest neighbor was over three miles away. She thought about it for a moment and then said, “No, I’ve got the trains to keep me company.” She then smiled at me and patted me on the head and said, “You will understand that someday.”

A railroad ran through the middle of the farm. Evidently it had originally been a “milk train” and had passed right alongside the barn so grandpa could load the milk cans onto special flatcars. The days of milk trains are long gone, but the track was now a regular main line and heavy freight and coal trains rumbled by many times each day. The house would vibrate slightly as they passed and the chandelier in the dining room would sway just a little from side to side. It took me several years to realize that grandma didn’t have some sixth sense that could tell her when a train was coming. If the pull chain for the lights in the chandelier started making little circles in the air, a train was coming. Thirty seconds or so after it started swinging, you could hear the whistles or feel the vibration of the ground.

A few months before she died, I asked her if the trains still kept her company.