Dinner was chicken and rice with a gigantic salad. Uncle T marveled at how the greens overflowed on our plates. After-dinner contentment and mild nostalgia planted me in this place—a house built fifty years ago.

We settled in around Uncle T’s ancient kitchen table. I had found a faded tablecloth to cover the cracks in its surface. Aunt Libby was gone two years now, though I felt her presence in that room, recalled the evening she told me she loved me. I cleared the table and scrubbed our plates in sudsy liquid. The odor brought on a sneeze.

Uncle T struck a match, and soon the sweet cinnamon scent of his pipe tobacco caressed my nostrils. I adored that aroma and told him. He smiled broadly and began a story.

“You know I rode the rails. I still fall asleep to the hum of that steel against steel.” He talked of a time when soup kitchens outnumbered corner markets, their shelves bare and dusty anyway.

“Mama was horrified.” Uncle T saved his mother’s dollars intended for his trips in sooty colored railroad cars—the separate, unequal choice open to him at the time. The same dingy cars I rode in as a little girl. I remembered the stink of coal dust and the neglected hard straw seats.

I rose from the kitchen table to put our dinner dishes in cupboards. My back was turned. Uncle T could not see water form in my eyes. It had been a lonely life before I found Aunt Libby and Uncle T. How lucky I was to be in this old man’s kitchen.

Each time I visited that old house Uncle T told another story. Tales of his adventures were patches of a time-worn quilt—our family’s patchwork that wrapped around me. Hugged me, like this old house.

“I rode the rails. Never had a problem,” Uncle T said. I had read about the brutal railroad cops, how they abused hobos and even daring, young men like him. But Uncle T denied run-ins in the freight yards. “No. I did it for five years from my Minnesota campus, home to Fort Smith, through college and grad school.” He was my tough old uncle.

He had been a tough young man. I closed my eyes. Imagined the stench of unwashed bodies and unbrushed teeth. I bet he didn’t remember the smells either.

Instead, he told me about discovering who he was. “I knew I was supposed to become a doctor.” I thought of the striking twenty-year-old face that smiled back at me from my bureau. Now decades later, I stared into that same gentle smile. And as Uncle T’s sturdy voice filled his kitchen, the years rolled away.

“I rode the rails. Late at night I hear that train whistle. Feel the hum of those steel rails.”

Quietude and honeyed spice filled the old house.