The chorus of your life

I thought this morning about my favourite sounds.

When I walk and I can hear the children playing in the  distance of the elementary school yard. I always stop to listen. It makes you remember not only your own childhood but your children's childhood as well.

The first bird of the morning when I walk outside. It feels as if it is singing directly to you. A floral song. 

Then there is the sound of a car pulling in the yard when someone you love has been away on a road trip. The sound of coming home, tires resting on the gravel of home.

The sizzle of a piece of fish when it hits the pan. It sounds crisp. Crackle, swish and turn to golden brown. 

I like the sound of people talking in my kitchen floating up through the old grate in the floor when I leave the company and go to bed early. That old metal grate is something no one has anymore it seems. An old fashioned sound like a child sitting at the top of the stairs while the party goes on downstairs. 

So many beautiful sounds. 

The tap of the keyboard when the writing is going well. 

The hook pulling the loops of yarn. Thrum Thrum Thrum.

And then sometimes what you crave is no sound at all. The sound of silence..

It to is beautiful and precious sound. How the quiet can settle over a room when everyone has gone out the door. Sometimes it is, you discover, what you have been craving for. 

Finally you can actually hear the sound of your hook. You turn off the radio. Shut down the tv. You think about unplugging the fridge but then you come back to your senses. A quiet house. It is the thing that as a young mother you were told you would dread. The empty nest. That you would be lonely, at odd ends, that you would not know what to do with yourself.

We are told stories of how our life will unfold. They are just stories. We ourselves cannot know what we will be like in ten years. The person we are now cannot predict who we will become. We can only guess. So how could anyone else predict it for us.

I am often told, when you get older you will see, you will be, you will know, you will understand. And all I know is that hopefully I will be. And in that hope I will be what I am meant to be. 

So far the sounds of my life have been unpredictable. I never imagined a chorus of thrum thrum thrum, or that at my grown up age I would still like the sound of people talking in the kitchen as I fell off to sleep. But these are the chorus of my life. And I hear that chorus, and I try to listen well to it knowing that it comes and goes, and that in between there is the beautiful hymn of silence to guide me.