You know I've been having trouble sleeping. I'll go to bed by 9 and then usually I'll sit on the edge of the bed and read. I can read the large print Readers Digest without any special aid. I have to take a little sleeping pill or two to even get to sleep then I'll wake up around 5, or earlier, and lay there until Simon, the Siamese cat that sleeps on the foot of my bed, or Peter, the Cocker Spaniel who sleeps on the floor by the foot of my bed, lets me know that they would like to go out. Usually it's time to get up anyway but sometimes we'll have an early call. Then I'll lay there and have lots of time to think, it seems I never can go back to sleep. That is not till daylight. Then I have to be careful for I'm afraid if I went to sleep then I might sleep all day. 

 This morning I got to thinking about all the retired race horses. They don't race horses past 14 I think, although Leonard Pitcher used to run a horse that might have been older than that.

 Every now and then you'll read about a woman, some times both man and wife, who hate to see retired race horses go the way so many do. They're shipped to Canada, auctioned off, slaughtered and shipped to France, where the meat brings a good price for it is eaten regularly there. People that have a fondness for a certain horse try to find a different way of retirement for that horse. If crude oil goes to $200 a barrel, things could change.

 When you get off the main roads, sometimes you'll see those country roads lined with trailers and small residences. There's usually a garage or some kind of a shelter for a car. Soon you might see an exercise yard built behind those garages and some of those retired horses might be back to work. 

 When people sell off the road frontage for homes it usually leaves a lot of vacant hill land behind that usually grows up to sumacs and then scrub pines. Soon you might see those hill acres growing oats and Timothy hay for horses. With that manure for gardens people might even begin raising a lot of their own food. There would be buses to take those people back and forth to work but it would take a lot of cars off the road. Wagon makers would start up again and horseshoers would get busy and you would see blacksmiths appear. Most of this is supposition but to me it only takes some memory to bring it all back again. 

 When we lived on Frank Sitser's farm which was four miles from Tunkhannock, the way that we usually went unless our mother was along or some one that might mind a rough ride. Then it would be a seven-mile drive. You went down our road to a little settlement where there was a hotel and the Lehigh Valley station but if you went to the post office or looked for the place on a map it was Osterhout. Some years ago, Bob and I went back down there and inquired our way to La Grange which was the little place by the Lehigh Station. The station had been closed and the man we asked about La Grange had never heard of it. At that time we knew two people that owned automobiles, the farm owner and our school teacher. The teacher's car must have been not very powerful for when he drove to his home he would ask two strong boys if they would like a ride for there were two small hills on his way home.