Sunday Morning 0800

This past weekend I made a conscious decision not to bring my computer to The Ranch - not only because the keyboard makes me reluctant to risk more damage but given my lack of time and InterWeb access when I am present there means there is neither purpose nor need to have it.  And so my mornings were unspoiled by the outside world except for periodic openings of the garage doors to give light to clean it out.

The morning here is surprisingly cool and damp - an unanticipated August rain the day before has left all clean and unexpectedly like Autumn.  It also indirectly kept away the typical Summer tourists and their sounds on the road:  almost no civilizational noise is present.

But the world is not without noise:  small bird song penetrates the morning breeze that transverses the screen doors between the front and the back of the house which is on the linear transit between them.  Out the back door, to the southeast and past the trees - perhaps as far as the main road in - the woods fill with goblin shrieks and howls as the wild turkeys sing songs of love and combat and the gleanings on the forest floor.  

The house is silent except for the monotonous ticking of the clocks.  I had to replace the battery in one of them this trip; the fact that it had essentially slowed down its interpretation of time while time had not in the least slowed down is not lost on me.

This living room, indeed this house, sits as silently and as empty as the world outside now.  The garage behind me on the couch has been sorted and with the exception of the furniture in some rooms, all the remaining items are be sold and gone except for those items we are keeping which are now boxed up in my parents' bedroom waiting for a final location.

The silence is overwhelming.  It echoes in my ears now in a way that it never does now that I live in the land of activity and noise.  The electrons of creation create a hum of action in my ears, the sound of pen and paper as I draft this is loud to me.  I can hear it, the scratch and tap of the pen coming on and off of the paper as I break the individual fibers, my thoughts almost burning through in the black ink like charcoal of a burned stick.  

Looking from the couch, the sunlight creates odd shadows and glares in the hallway that is now cleared of the family pictures that used to hang there - the bare walls of a life ending or beginning.

How does one process this, this intersection of beginnings and endings, of the silence and simplicity of nature against the roar of civilization that awaits me with its frenetic activity and constant flow of information?

In the distance a woodpecker about its business hammers into a tree.  I, too, must eventually be about mine.