Quiet times

 

The woods at Roundtop are the quietest they will be all year. Once the leaves come out, it is a rare moment when the wind is still enough to keep them from whispering. The leaves sometimes seem to rustle on their own, when no wind is perceptible. It’s only when the trees are bare of leaves and the wind is still that the silence is this deep.

In midwinter, I can usually hear the sounds from the ski resort, though that is never loud. The sounds I hear then might come from a lift or a few teenagers yelling back and forth or perhaps just a lift operator banging his snow shovel against the concrete at the bottom of his lift. I hardly think about those sounds—until they disappear entirely.

So now the night is utterly quiet, unless a dog barks across the valley or the great horned owl hoots or the geese over on the big pond are fussing about something. I can stand still for minutes at a time and not hear a single sound. It’s a lovely time, a lovely thing to experience. It never lasts long enough to suit me, so I enjoy every precious second before the silences slips away and is hidden inside the sounds of the forest.