I saw this article on the internet today and immediately thought, “Boy, would these guys like to live in The Peanut Butter Cafe & Roadhouse.” Why? Well, because we are located very, very close to a railroad, double track. and have trains go by all the time. It is a big house, with lots of room for family, BUT it is close to the tracks. After we moved here, one lady mentioned to me that the house had been for sale before and she and her husband had looked at it and really liked it and then remarked to themselves, “But look where it is.”  Well, okay.

Sometimes I think of railroad tracks in a great number of places being abandoned and here I live so close to a really active one. Sigh. It is interesting however that my Great-Great Aunt Anna and her husband Ed were killed in 1941 at this very crossing just down from this house. They had one of the first automatic shift cars and somehow at the crossing, Ed must have made a mistake and they went right into the train. He died at once; Anna lived for several hours. Maybe today she would have made it – she was tough.

Grandma was supposed to go with them that day because they were going to visit a minister down here in Kendallville, haveing driven down from Scott. But, for some reason, she did not. My mother says she remembers Grandma going out to the car to tell them she couldn’t go after all. Lots of people later assumed my grandmother had also been killed.

Auntie Annie, as Mother called her, was only a few years older than my grandmother, her niece. Wesley Wisler, Grandma’s father was Anna’s oldest brother. Anna didn’t have a child until she was 42 or so and then, five years later, the little girl, Lucinda Jane, died of menningitis. They brought a doctor up from Fort Wayne, but there was nothing to be done. Later, they adopted a daughter – a five year old- stopping by Grandma’s to exclaim, “Look what we’ve got.”

All those years later, when my mother helped  that now woman clean out the house after the deaths, they found an old built-in medicine chest that still held the prescriptions Lucinda Jane had been given.

Didn’t this start out to be a reference to living near the tracks? I believe it did. Well, that’s what happens when you let your mind wander.