Its late and the house is completely silent and as I'm getting up to go take a divinely hot bath, I can hear a train in the distance. There are train tracks about a mile away from the house, they are back off the main roads and so I never even know they are there--except at night when the house is so quiet and the trains roll through. My mother grew up in a small fishing town off of Lake Erie in Ohio. Its about an hour and a half from where I grew up, and nearly every weekend (literally) of my young life we went and spent in that little town with my grandparents. We even lived there for a year or so when I was four or five. There are train tracks right behind St. Mary's Catholic church which is just a few houses from my grandparents. Nights spent there are always punctuated with the sounds of the trains blowing through. My great-grandmother, so my grandmother has told me innumerable times in my life, stood too close to the train tracks when she was young and had all the toes on her right foot sliced right off! As you can imagine, this favorite tale was always accompanied with stern warnings to stay off the tracks. I know that some portion of it is true as she really did loose her toes to the train tracks...but how it actually happened has been lost in this little myth of our family. "HOW could she stand so close to the train tracks that just her toes got cut off," the cousins whispered to each other when we heard the trains at night and were suppose to be sleeping. "If she was standing that close, don't you think she would have been squashed, doesn't the box of the train overlap the tracks??" I cannot imagine how often this story has been told, first to my mother and her 8 siblings and then to all the cousins that have come since, I can't walk across the tracks even today, or listen to the train run the rails in quiet of my own home, without thinking about great-grandma and how her toes got sliced off from standing too close to the tracks.