Cheese Bridge

Today I kept thinking about the Cheese Bridge.

The Cheese Bridge is this bridge near where I grew up that was a railroad bridge back in the day. By the time I came around, it was just a rusted piece of metal. It wasn't a functional bridge, even for walking, as it was just a frame suspended over a shallow river.

And yet somehow, someone graffitied the word "CHEESE" on it. Through the years, other graffiti would come and go - the more typical initials or profanities - or the paint would fade - but someone would always come back and spray paint CHEESE again. And so it became known as the Cheese Bridge. In fact, you can google map "Cheese Bridge" and it comes up!

And then a couple years ago, the town was expanding a bike path over the old railroad tracks, and the got to the Cheese Bridge. They added railings and a bottom so you could walk on it, and they painted it a nice shade of green. My dad says they must've put at least four coats of paint on that bridge, trying to cover up the word CHEESE.

But you can still see it. It'd been spray painted so many times in the same place that it had taken on a somewhat 3-D effect. The layers of paint that had built up to spell CHEESE just pop out no matter how many coats of paint they put on. It's all green, but you can see CHEESE protruding.

I was thinking about this because when I think about leaving a legacy, I want to be like that word CHEESE. I never wanted to be famous. I'm okay if no one remembers my name after I die. Some people struggle with the idea that they'll be forgotten, but that doesn't bother me. No one knows who painted the word CHEESE, or even if it was the same person every time. More likely, various people just kept the tradition going.

And that's how I want my life to be. Even if no one knows that I was the one who left the legacy, I want to help shape the future for the better. I want to leave a legacy that continues, to live a life worth of other people following in my footsteps so that one day, no amount of paint can cover over that legacy.