Valleys of the Wind

The summer had rolled into the valley, and so the air smelled of hot grass from the fields. It was quiet at the station, where a single train clacked each way in the afternoon. The only sound was the wind, which caught the heads of dry grass and roared up the slopes of the mountain ranges around her.

It seemed an exaggeration to even call it a station, since the bare concrete slab had been laid fifty years ago and left to crumble. The installation of a station sign had been the first work on it in decades. The whole world seemed to have forgotten this place. Every day she would catch the train both ways to university, and watch Vekllei’s ancient slopes groan by as the train cars rounded the waists of the valleys. There was no hurry out here. There were no thoughts of the future. In Vekllei’s warm agrestic towns, pastoral spiritualism took many forms; and for her, no site would stir the heart like the old concrete station outside of Montre-Lola.