narrative essay

“Sun is shinin' in the sky there ain't a cloud in sight it's stopped rainin' ev'rybody's in a play and don't you know it's a beautiful new day hey,hey” blasts Electric Light Orchestra from my cousins head phones as she sleeps, her body gently being rocked by the movement of the train. The only ones on the train, my aunt sits reclusively in a corner playing Tetris, and my uncle a few rows away fumbles with his new state of the art digital camera. No one seems to be aware of the shinning crystals resting on the frosty trees, in the linen covered landscape that is Switzerland in the midst of its most glorious winter. The warmth of the heater reaches its smooth hand across the cabin and wraps its comforting arms around each of us but as I pull open the window a harsh waft of the bitter outside rushes in unexpectedly. “Close that damned window! What are you thinking?!” screams my aunt. “And sit down; you are going to get us kicked off the train. Then where will we be?” Actually, if she was asking literally we would have been in the middle of one of Liechtenstein’s’ thick wondrous forests. But she was not asking literally, she was cranky after five and a half hours on a train with no one but her husband, daughter and annoying niece.
All I wanted to do was to be more connected with this unfathomable beauty, in a physical way. The chilly wind on my face was soothing and I wanted to view this beauty with my eyes, without the intervention of a glass window pane. I realized, after closing the window and returning to my seat that it wasn’t that my family didn’t notice the beauty, they did, they just didn’t care. “Its winter, what did you expect.”
After hours and even days on the train, we eventually ended up in Paris. To travel to the Louvre was on the agenda and at 4:33 the piercing shrill of our hotel phone rings and my drowsy cousin answers.