The house is quiet

The house is quiet, an oddity I am still unaccustomed to in daylight. Hayes gets home from work in about another hour, but the kids won’t be back from their week at their dad’s until Monday. I hear the hum of the air conditioner, Sylvie snoring her teeny kitty snores every so often, the soft tapping sound my keyboard makes, but behind it all, the quiet.

Summer days go slow, especially when Laura and Will are gone. I usually wake up with Hayes so I can see him a bit before he leaves and then walk on the dirt road behind the house before it gets too hot. Really, even 8:30 is too hot in South Carolina. I work in this desultory way, caught between the tasks left over from last semester and those coming up next year, trying to write and washing clothes in between attempts so that tonight I can say at least I managed to do something today. Kitty comes in and rubs my leg with his head, I run out of printer paper, I make spinach salad with dried cranberries and mandarin oranges and walnuts and feta, I watch the sun move across the floor, I wish for a Sprite and try not to drink one because of the sugar, the calories. Some bad WNOK song lingers in my head from listening to the radio with Laura in the car last week, but it’s only an echo. I haven’t heard SpongeBob SquarePants’s squeaky voice for days, and I both do and don’t miss him chasing earnestly after jellyfish. Sometimes I wander through the house, beautifully clean and staying that way all week with the kids away, and I wonder if this quiet will be all I hear when they grow up and move out, which is coming sooner than I’d like.

But it’s not an empty quiet—rather one filled with potential. I can play Ella Fitzgerald or Chopin or crank the Black Eyed Peas and no one will complain, though I always feel pretentious listening to the classical music, even when I’m alone. Something about the quiet focuses my attention, and in these long weeks in the summer I can let that attention flit here and there without shame. It feels decadent, lush, fruitful. It is decadent.