THE SOUND OF SILENCE

It is not a big thing that we were without power last night. The wind blew down a wire(s). What is interesting is the sound of silence, which is, not silent, at all.

We could hear a flutter, almost as if the wind was under the siding. We could hear the wind howl, and the clock chime.

Which led us to a conversation about Grandpa Johnson and his wife. They had a chime clock in their house. Tom could never understand how they could stand to have that racket every 15 minutes. And I agreed that, as a child, my grandparents, too, had a clock that chimed, well, really in bonged.

When mother died, I took the Seth Thomas pull to wind clock back to Fargo. It had a double dinger in it, (almost like an echo). Tom disengaged one of the hammers for a single bong. Upstairs, in the craft room, we have one of those 4-times-an-hour clocks.

Do we hear them? No. We can sit in the living room with the Seth Thomas bonging, and not hear it.

But when everything is silent and all the modern conveniences are still, it really isn't silent at all.

Are you listening?