Quiet here

For a pleasant surprise, my sleep last night was nine to five. The tendency to sleep well and long seems to go with the new living accommodation. Quiet here. Maybe when the weather cools, instead of the Beck bedroom, we’ll sleep in the Bay bedroom with the door open a bit for the Bay sound lapping against the shore below. We did that at “High Heaven” last fall above the sounds of the Gulf, and it was among many things that made us smile.

Quiet here. The mind is comparing to our last forty years, which turns out to be an apt Bible term that either can be taken literally or can signify a long time. 

Forty years ago we moved from Washington, DC to a creekside home on the Conodoguinet Creek between Harrisburg and Carlisle, Pennsylvania. Lovely but neighborhood sounds, and life far too hectic our eight years there to worry about sleeping, ὁ ἀναγινώσκων νοείτω. I remember no sleep in that bedroom; what I remember is the time Linda, Tass and I returned from a week in Florida where I had taught one of my courses at the University of West Florida, to find that one of teenage Joe’s many teenage buddies had imprinted the sole of his sneaker on the ceiling over our bed. It was my first hint of what went on in our house when we were away. 

But I am thinking about sleep, eh? 

Thirty one years ago this month we moved into the 1900 rectory of Trinity Episcopal Church, Apalachicola, Florida. The rectory bedroom had two distinctive sounds. The bedroom window is right on US98, the exact distance from the corner, that beside my pillow every eighteen-wheeler shifted gears down if headed east, and up if headed west, right at my ear. And every emergency vehicle screams its siren and honks its horn as it races down the center of the king-size bed between me and my significant other. 

The other sound in that wonderful, beloved, quaint old town was every rooster shrieking back and forth with and at every other rooster as they panic to make sure the sun hasn’t died in the night. My waking those fourteen years was intermittent throughout every night, and constant before every dawn.

In 1998, finally keeping our mutual promise of all those years since summer 1957, we moved home to Panama City, into the house my grandparents built in 1912. Leaving the house is still too raw to go there at the moment, so to the point. Infinitely quieter than the rectory. Still, traffic sounds, motorcycles, the early morning trash truck, the truck changing the dumpsters at Landmark Condominiums at dawn half a block away. Up daily before dawn to get Linda’s PCNH and to greet my green light across the Bay.  

Quiet here. Sleep is good. Even dawn comes so silently that this morning I almost missed it:

July 16, 2015.

W in +Time