Tomah Train Station :: Photographer Unknown
When the train approached the station thirty-seven years ago I was excited. I was excited at most of the stops we made crossing the country because I’d never been to any of those places, or even east of Culbertson, Montana. We were in Wisconsin and I missed the conductor’s announcement about the stop, but I saw the station sign next to the tracks a quarter mile out and it said Tomah. I thought the sign was wrong even though it was blurry through part of a moving train window. I assumed it was supposed to read Tomahawk, with the ‘awk’ letters missing. My grandmother, Florence Scott, grew up in Tomahawk, Wisconsin, and I wanted it to be Tomahawk. Tomahawk does exist in a different part of the state, but I didn’t know that then. I even started an ink drawing about it the next day titled Tomah while we where in Ohio en route to Rhode Island. Eight years later I drove by the Interstate 94 exit sign to Tomah on my way to Chicago from Minneapolis. I’d been mistaken for years. If laptops, Wi-Fi and Google had existed while I was on the train in 1983, I might have discovered my assumption was wrong, but that technology didn’t exist.
Whenever I imagine her hometown and her childhood with her sisters Georgia and Belle, it’s mostly fiction. I don’t remember most of her history there, but I know what Wisconsin feels like because we live near it and spend time there. I know what a small town with a lake nearby feels like too because I’ve lived in similar towns and watched TV shows like The Walton’s and especially the opening to the Andy Griffith Show when I was a kid. Maybe she had experiences like that. My parents told me that she was strong, direct, and didn’t suffer fools. I remember her hospitality and grace, like when she made me poached eggs for breakfast, how she managed family during holiday dinners and Easter egg hunts, and when my cousin and I picked apples from her tree on Saturday. I remember other moments too, but not how my grandmother felt, or how her childhood and teen years shaped her because I never asked.
She visited me in a dream when I was an adult many decades after she died. She wore a distinctive blue and white floral-patterned dress that I remembered from my childhood. When I told my mom about the dream, she remembered that dress too. My grandmother and I were in a small dimly lit room with the warm light from a window illuminating dust particles in the air. We looked at each other and after a minute, she walked over and gently touched my arm. I still feel her hand and and remember how the hazy light warmed and brightened slightly when she told me “everything is going to be alright.”
Songs :: Tell Me All the Things You Do and The Way I Feel by Fleetwood Mac, White Lily by Laurie Anderson and Here by David Byrne
© C. Davidson