Postcard prose – Issue 3 | February 2009
Wanderlust
by Janice D. Soderling
I thrill to the sight of docked freighters, their decks filled with timber or containers, ready to lift anchor and glide out to the open seas. I love waiting in run-down bus stations, watching as people meet and embrace, part with tears.
As a kid, I lay listening to the mournful whistle of freight trains hauling through the night. When I get big, I would tell the darkness, I’ll hop an old boxcar. I wanted to be a tramp, a wanderer, a rover with a stick on my shoulder and, tied to the end of it, a red kerchief with a pair of clean panties, a couple of books and some food. I had never seen a body of water bigger than Johnson’s pond, but like an old seadog stranded ashore, I muttered with Masefield, I must down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky.
One Christmas I got a pink plastic purse and a lockable, tin globe-bank, with a coin slot that sliced across Canada. I would sooner have died than priss around with a pink purse, and I quickly lost the bank key, but I memorized the name of every thread-thin river, every dot that was a South Sea island.
Now, in a rattletrap, half-empty lkarbus, pulling out of Agadir, I close my book and still my hunger with dates and cheese, a bottle of water. A young father across the aisle holds his son close, caresses the boy’s brow and cheeks. The man points out the window into the flat Moroccan landscape, naming things: goat, donkey, house, palm tree, flamingo, camel. The child repeats each word after the father, and they laugh softly. Something like a freight train hauls along the tracks of my heart.
About the author
A regular contributor to The Literary Bohemian, Janice D. Soderling has two true loves: travel and books. She went to Rome with Gibbon and to Athens with Homer. She went to California with John Steinbeck.
Her own writing can be found at Anon, The Centrifugal Eye, The Chimaera, Frostwriting, and Umbrella Journal, among others.
