I have one light on, in the open area between the living room and den . There is light enough to see the keyboard and the text I create.

On the television, streaming from YouTube is the webcam picture of the railroad tracks in Ashland. I’m waiting for #98 The Silver Meteor , bound ultimately for New York. The train originated in Miami, travels past Cape Canaveral, St Augustine, Jacksonville, Savannah Charleston, the North Carolina Piedmont , into cotton, tobacco, and peanut country. It passes the commercial hog farms with their noisome smells. I can’t recall if the Meteor stops in Smithfield, North Carolina. If it did, one could disembark and visit the Ava Gardner Museum Her shrine sits near the tobacco fields, whose produce ultimately killed her. Irony is merely knowing too much.

By the time the train reaches Virginia , with more cotton, peanuts, soybeans tobacco and hogs, we have seen the South, in all of her tragedy, glory and squalor.

This is about as old as one can get in America, except for Santa Fe in New Mexico. Four hundred years from Jamestown and the malaria that prompted a move to higher ground in Williamsburg and architecture only a Rockefeller could duplicate.

I wish I could say the Silver Meteor stopped in Williamsburg, but it doesn’t. It crosses Virginia at the Fall Line of the Appomattox, the James, the Rappahannock and Potomac, of battlefields and burial grounds, the dirt patches of war, so readily forgotten, but for the Myths engendered.

I should go back to bed, the little bed, maybe to sleep some more and dream of lovers I’ve never met, of wives now divorced, dead or who simply spurn me in Baptist purity, a chastity reclaimed.

Time for another cup of tea, as I watch a freight hauling plywood.

Good morning, folks.