the loudness of quiet...

Profound, huh?  The loudness of quiet?  It is amazing how loud a quiet house can be.  Tom and I intentionally live in the middle of this beautiful, vast open country.  We rarely hear sirens, and when we do, we're usually the ones in the fire truck turning them on (for testing).  These days the motorcycles make a bit more noise on the highway, but there is still such little traffic.  There is the occasional braying of a donkey, barking of a dog, or the laughter/fighting of children at the neighbors.  The sounds of our "city" are pretty quiet when compared to our days in Denver.  The sounds of our home are pretty noisy: clock ticking, refrigerator and freezer running, maybe a dishwasher or load of laundry in the dryer, the whirring of the ceiling fan, and the humming of the swamp cooler.  Those little white noises that we can't hear until they are silenced.   Of course, the wind is usually the noisiest of all.

I got home Monday about 5 pm.  I did this and that.  About 5:25pm the power went out.  The phone made its clicking noises until the spare battery died.  The smoke alarms made a pitiful show of beeping intermittently and then slowly wheezing off over a series of whimpering beeps.  The clock in the TV room still ticked, but there was a hush that was stifling.  It should have been the perfect condition to read, but I wanted music.  I don't know how long I sat there with the magazine in my lap, but eventually I gave up and thought I needed to get outside where I couldn't sense the uselessness of the power lines overhead.

I walked towards Tom, in no particular hurry to get anywhere, but distracted by what looked like billowing smoke the color of dust north of us.  It looked like it was coming from behind a hill, so I couldn't see if there really was a fire.  As I continued in the direction of the firehouse, I knew we hadn't gotten paged, but wondered all the same.  Within a few minutes I could see that it was just a dust storm, and a few minutes after that, my ride showed up.  I rode home with Tom and told him about the outage.

Neither of us were hungry, though we could cook whatever we want with a gas stove.  I finished the magazine and went back outside.  The little garden is missing a few more bindweed, but everything felt like waiting.  When I heard the phone ring, I went back in, but it was just Tom's cell.  Finally, the lights flickered, the fan started back on its endless cycle, the appliances hummed.  Two hours and ten minutes.  Long enough for a movie.  Somehow with the power back on, we were ready to eat and get back to living again.