Originally written in September, 2023.
One day, before I leave home, I want to walk down our driveway and record the train’s lonesome call. So when I’m an ocean away on a tatami mat, or only thirty minutes down the road standing at my kitchen sink surrounded by evidence of the life I’m building, or somewhere in between, I’ll have at least one sound from home.
For as long as I can remember, the train has always run wailing, mourning through our town with nobody but the neighborhood dogs to wail back.
Even after all these years growing up near the train tracks, I’ll hear the trains, their deep and eerie moans, and can’t help but pause. It sounds like both an end and a beginning, draping over the atmosphere like a warm and rumbling blanket. It makes you feel like the whole world is hearing what you’re hearing.
There are other sounds I’d record to remind me of home. The clang and the rattle of our ever full dishwasher. The splash of our hose as it fills another water trough. My mom crunching on ice, my dad asking how long the milk’s been sitting on the table, my brother practicing worship in the back room, and my singers belting out Hamilton tunes.
And though I haven’t lived that long, there are already pieces to the soundtrack of my life that have been lost –
The slow, steady plod of our long suffering goat Blackie
The high-pitched boyish excitement from my brothers
The slight list of my youngest sister
Grandpa’s voice, silent now for five Septembers
These sounds aren’t ever coming back, I know. And yet even in their absence, new sounds have slipped in through the back door and made themselves at home.
Come winter, the bleats of baby goats will surround us. And though I no longer hear the sound of my brother creating music from his room every night, I do get to hear the tell-tale crunch of his car rolling up the driveway, and the chorus of “Welcome home’s!” he receives the second the backdoor opens. My sister no longer lisps and she can say spaghetti without batting an eye. As I type this, she’s rehearsing lines for her role as Anne in Anne of Green Gables.
And each year, I get to hear the first acorns drop as we stand around grandpa's grave on the first day of autumn.
Though death seems so victorious as the tree limbs release life and our lungs exhale our grief, I know that this current and ugly song of the Fall has only one ending. It can only give way to the symphony of restored life on the other side, waiting to welcome our weary bodies and this broken creation to where we’ve always belonged – with the Composer of the universe.
I’ve never really admitted it out loud, but in those first few seconds when the train’s roar fills the air, I pause most because it sounds like what I imagine an angel’s trumpet to sound. It sounds like the first note, breaking through the din of the world to announce that Jesus has come. And when he comes, every knee will bow and every tongue confess. Every sad song will become untrue in the endless roar of worship to the Lamb who conquered through death.
And I think it will finally sound like home. Don't you?