Along Train Tracks

As I write this, I am jostling on the commuter train homeward for the weekend, back to that concrete jungle that raised me, New York City . By technology's touch, I've been hooked up onto interwebs, but I don't know if I'll manage to hit the "publish" key before it's I exit this leviathan of steel and tracks.

I am too mesmerized, longed into aching by the view in front of me. The sunset hits with serendipity, right as we plummet headlong past quaint Amish countryside scenes on our way out of Pennsylvania. Everything I believe in is out there: the golden wheat fields, the verdant cornfields, and those farmhouses, always those sweet farmhouses, whitewashed, or stone, straddled by a silo or two.  We swing around a curve, and pass by a large pasture with young draft horses in it! The dusk light gleams off of golden-coated Belgian yearlings and my chest swells up. Amongst them, a gray dappled creature tosses his head, picks up his feet....I am lost in possibilities.

I watch this scene, lost in a yearning not unlike a prisoner watching through for light in a sliver of a stone cell. I am within finger's reach of this world, this rural world I keep musing upon...yet strangely outside of it....

Instead, the mission at hand still remains becoming an expert at a physically demanding job. Actually, I consider it a challenge that I am proud and interested in undertaking but, it currently is pummeling my median-level active body to a pulp. I know I will get stronger, but for now it's all screaming muscles and dreams of

I guess I wonder though, where this Pennsylvania community is? I don't really even know who to reach out to, other than boss-friend, who has been kind to give me apricots and strawberries and barter ideas and services. Is there anyone else near Camp Hill PA who is interested in (urban) farming? Has a yen for keeping chickens? Knows or cares for old-time music? Has things for barter or wants to start a barter community?

I've checked Craigslist, Meetup and other similar sorts of community oriented publications and it seems a bit disjointed (though very positive on the whole) in regards to finding such a community? So if anyone lives near me and would like a weird---but educated and funny--vagabond friend to exchange ideas, I am for it!

But for now--for now--I am traveling home....oddly, for a working weekend. Yes, by the time you read this, I will have leapt our building with a single bound (or perhaps some grunting and sweating), and harvested honey from bees that have been left to their own devices for a month. As bees are wont to do, they will have glued their frames up with propolis and nectar of the gods--honey. There are people who have been kind, have been loyal, and who seem to like our honey, and this will be shipped off for their enjoyment.

Perhaps there will be down time, in between this. To sleep, to enjoy the intense heat of an intense Summer. Soon enough I will be traveling along train tracks, back to that other world. Such is the life of this modern day Vagabond, traveling along train tracks. I tip my hat to my hobo predecessors, who hopped trains for a living.

Some things never change....