Last fall I took my nine-month-old daughter outside a little after five o’clock in the morning. She had been up most of the night with a snotty nose and had apparently thrown up at one point because of all the drainage. In the dark of my bedroom I felt for an outfit to put on her, got her dressed, then took her out the back door. Despite the fact that we live in area with considerable light pollution, the stars were vivid and pointy. I quickly identified the Big and Little dippers as well as Orion’s Belt. Thin white clouds moved slowly between us and the stars. The moon hid somewhere behind the tall old oak trees. I paced in my flip flops up and down the gravel driveway, turning over small bits of rock with each step.
My daughter lay in my arms, her head in the crook of my left elbow. For the first several minutes she gazed at the lights around her: my next-door neighbor's porch light, the street lamps, the light from our laundry room near the back door. Crickets chirped their final few songs. A plane gave a small blast as it left the airport a few miles away. Back and forth we went, down toward the street, turning before the light from the streetlamp got too bright, then turning again near the back door. Trying to stay in the dark. A few blocks away, a dump truck slammed its massive metal bins onto the road.
No birds sang. No cars passed on our street. We were enveloped by cricket music, punctuated by the scuffing of my flip flops on the gravel and an occasional sucking noise from my daughter's pacifier.
Before long, she began to drift off, her eyelids sliding down slowly, then raising, then sliding down again. Finally, they slid down and stayed. I continued walking with her in the driveway for another ten or fifteen minutes, partly to make sure she was asleep, but also to enjoy the relative quiet, to feel the satisfaction of helping the baby go to sleep, to listen to the crickets a while longer, and to imbibe as much silence as possible through the veil of ambient noise. Mostly I kept walking because I don’t get outside as much as I’d like to, and I’ve discovered that there is more real silence outside, even in a noisy place, than there is in the quietest room in the house.
My daughter lay in my arms, her head in the crook of my left elbow. For the first several minutes she gazed at the lights around her: my next-door neighbor's porch light, the street lamps, the light from our laundry room near the back door. Crickets chirped their final few songs. A plane gave a small blast as it left the airport a few miles away. Back and forth we went, down toward the street, turning before the light from the streetlamp got too bright, then turning again near the back door. Trying to stay in the dark. A few blocks away, a dump truck slammed its massive metal bins onto the road.
No birds sang. No cars passed on our street. We were enveloped by cricket music, punctuated by the scuffing of my flip flops on the gravel and an occasional sucking noise from my daughter's pacifier.
Before long, she began to drift off, her eyelids sliding down slowly, then raising, then sliding down again. Finally, they slid down and stayed. I continued walking with her in the driveway for another ten or fifteen minutes, partly to make sure she was asleep, but also to enjoy the relative quiet, to feel the satisfaction of helping the baby go to sleep, to listen to the crickets a while longer, and to imbibe as much silence as possible through the veil of ambient noise. Mostly I kept walking because I don’t get outside as much as I’d like to, and I’ve discovered that there is more real silence outside, even in a noisy place, than there is in the quietest room in the house.
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