It’s Quiet Here

It’s so quiet here. I think I’m used to the silence. I forget that in other places, other worlds, the sound of traffic and ambulances and machines and beeping horns become normal static. 

Something everyone takes in, but all unconsciously. White noise, you know? 

But here? 

I’m nowhere. The mountains close in the fields, and the trees close in the creek, and the houses squat somewhere between them, dusty and proud. All the acreage has names. So-and-so’s farm. We sit on our porches and wave at each other. Tractors rumble by. The neighbor’s rooster crows every morning. One of the nearby cows bawls his unhappiness, most afternoons. 

Somewhere between the crickets chirping in the evening and the barn swallows warbling in the day, that silence finds me. It swirls inside the windows of my old farmhouse. Then plays mutely along my walls. Then climbs inside me, into my head—then deeper, into my soul. 

And it stirs there, like a breeze, soft and coaxing. 

Until all the dust of the day—my experiences, my thoughts, my interactions—start to float upward. They drift all the way to my whispering lips to my fingers, and there they glide free. 

The silence turns into words. 

Then paper. 

Then books. 

Maybe I could write in other places. Maybe I could write in noisy rooms, in busy cities, and find ways to block out—or cease to acknowledge—the static. 

But forgive me, if I tend to linger in the meadows and the countryside. 

I love the silence best.