Sound and Silence

I’ve always been a city girl. My nights were full of sirens and people, so many people, so many that you sometimes almost missed the skitter of rats across the subway tracks. Pigeons kept to the daylight mostly, squabbling in noisy clashes of feathers on my office windowsill, on the eaves of the subway stop, in the unfortunate architecture of the laundry room entryway. Before I moved I had taken to draping Teddy’s old towel across the clean laundry. Otherwise, the pigeons would sense opportunity and do their damndest to land a bullseye on my clothes. That was one of the things I was grateful for out here - no fighting with the pigeons. No battling nature in general, honestly. The rats, if they existed, only had so many walls to build nests in, and from what I could see most of those walls belonged to homes with at least one dog. Without fail the dogs were not so abominable snowmen, gleefully romping through the drifts that kept growing throughout the season. The snow was another thing that I loved. The snow never got dirty here. It stayed white, topped off fresh every other day or so. It stayed soft too, with maybe a little crunch or crust at the top but never the resentful and jagged ice of car exhaust that sealed snowfalls in Chicago. The city blamed you for having the audacity to leave your apartment in winter, the mountains begged you to come outside. Teddy didn’t come outside with me. He was the embodiment of that internet meme showing one little pawprint in the snow outside a sliding door. Everyone who has owned a cat can imagine the seconds before that photo was snapped: a twitch of disgust shivering through the whiskers, a few disgruntled shakes of the paw and then the immediate dismissal of not just the snow and the door, but the entirety of the outside. The rest of us poor fools had to go shovel the driveway, but Teddy and his kind just refused to dignify the insulting world with their acknowledgement. That said, as long as outside stayed outside, Teddy was fine with observing from the second floor. The wide windowsills of this old house were right above the radiators, and his long striped orange tail would twitch in the rising heat while he watched snowflakes fall and the occasional blue jay flit from tree to tree. We were at most a mile outside town at the edge of the Vermont woods, but it seemed like the end of the world. My routine grew simpler the longer I stayed. I had come here to focus on my dissertation but within a week my obsessive focus gave way to a few hours of writing or reading interspersed with walks that got longer and longer. The days spent here felt like breathing, steady rhythms of taking in and clearing out. Pared down this way, I couldn’t lose my minutes in things. I never found an item that I couldn’t trace back to the moment that I decided to bring it into my life. It was the first time that I had left abundance to explore the edges of enough. And there was always enough, that was the eternal surprise of the short days and long nights. Enough was made of layers. Enough wine until the bottle was done, enough firewood until it burned itself out, enough warm clothing for another layer until it was time to sleep where there was enough down and wool to keep me cozy through the night. One of those endless evenings I was reading in bed when an owl tried to snatch Teddy from his perch. The frenzied flapping of the owl’s enormous silent wings against the window was disorienting. It was if someone had hit the mute button on my life. The owl perched eventually, peering curiously in at the two of us. It was just as wide-eyed, but far more composed. When it left, it didn’t so much wing off as end up swallowed by the night. I could have written it off as an apparition if it weren’t for the disgruntled ball of static under the covers. Teddy was back on the windowsill the next day but when the sun sank behind the mountains he made a point of heading to the fire. The flux of filling and making space made everything a little ritual that sanctified the past and blessed the future. I used as many leftovers as possible during each meal, knowing that each square inch I freed up meant I could change direction a little more on the next grocery run. Emptying the ashes from the wood stove was like stretching into the pause in between my inhale and my exhale, remembering last night’s fire before walking to the shed to begin tonight’s. The owl never came back, although I’d hear it scream every now and then. The first time, I nearly jumped out of my skin. It’s not a cute little hoot, it’s a gargling shriek that lasts for what feels like minutes. But just like the city, eventually you got to know the sounds. Sometimes you could hear coyotes singing in the distance, once or twice I heard the wail of a fox in heat, and when a sculpture of icicles shattered all at once it was a crystal destruction. But most of the time it was just me, Teddy, and the silent world of falling snow. In that beautiful stillness my soul began to grow wings.