Meanders

By James Just

Forty years in the writing, Jame's Just's poem Meanders takes us on a journey of the heart and spirit. Through Northern California and Oregon, Europe and Central America, we share the adventure of the path to becoming human.

Meanders is Just's third book of poetry, following A Year of Days and Sketches of Poás. Just writes and lives with his wife Irina and their dogs in the mountains of Costa Rica.

• Language: English
• Publisher: James Just
• Release date: Nov 29, 2017
• ISBN: 9781370036035

James Just

James Just writes and lives with his wife Irina and their dogs in the mountains of Costa Rica.

Book preview

I. Northern California

Tracks

As a young boy I lived with my family - mother, father, two sisters and then little Peggy - in a small three-bedroom California rambler built by my father’s father in a new but modest tract at the north edge of Sacramento, the sleepy state capital. The lot was squeezed between wide and busy Elvas Avenue and the Southern Pacific railroad levee. Beyond were fields of grass singing with meadowlarks in the spring, then another levee constraining the American River.

My buddy Doug lived next door, his dad worked for the railroad. We would laze away summer days lying in the grass, counting the freight cars as they passed: ninety, a hundred, hundred and ten, even more as diesel-electric replaced steam. Names evoking exotic places were stenciled on sides: Great Northern, Norfolk and Western, Santa Fe, Burlington, Milwaukie and Northern, Illinois Central, New York Central, Lehigh Valley, Baltimore and Ohio, Chesapeake, Belt Line, Reading, Great Southern.

At a junction a half-mile to the west, a double set of tracks branched off to the north and crossed the river on a wooden trestle. Another branch veered to the south, past the Pony League baseball diamond on the left, past the American Can Company served by a siding.  The far side of the levee was farm land. A dirt road led past the ball park, up and over the levee, down to a farmhouse inhabited only by the bees