The world is (not) quiet here.
At 4:30am, you can really tell. So here are some thoughts and a short poem on the cleansing quiet of countryside.
Towns and cities don’t know the meaning of quiet.
Right now, Arthur (very reasonably, I think) tends to sleep until about 4:30am. Sometimes 5am, if he’s feeling generous. He wakes up hangry, has a drink then usually decides it’s all a bit much and goes straight back to bed. The life, right?
In the first weeks he would be awake near constantly. Later, he’d wake every couple of hours. And I found I stopped needing to check the time, because I could tell by the cars. Headlights bouncing now and then through the window, car engines, slamming doors, occasional drifting voices: probably around 11pm. The odd taxi vrooming up the avenue: 2 or 3am. Murmuring of the first commuters: 6am.
During today’s early morning milk run, as I rocked in my chair, gazing with heavy eyelids through the crack in the curtains, silence almost reigned. Until it was broken by a single, distant car: 3:45am. The ever-shining light from the main road pierced the darkness of the room; like me, the street sleeps with one eye open. Because here, there’s also no such thing as dark. Can’t-see-your-hand-in-front-of-your-face dark. Need-a-torch-to-walk-home-from-the-pub dark. Or look-up-into-distant-galaxies dark, where each time you blink you see new stars, barely-there pinpricks dusted over the ink.
Having grown up in the middle of nowhere on the Lincolnshire fens, I miss the kind of quiet where the rustle of a hedge makes you jump out of your skin — and the kind of dark where no matter how long you have for your eyes to adjust, it doesn’t seem to get any brighter.
The silence. The sky. The air.
Home knows quiet, and dark, and stars, and the sort of fresh air you could probably sell on eBay. So does the place we stay in Cornwall — while I was away, I scribbled a few notes for this quick poem after a walk.
Enjoy. And if you head into the countryside in the sunshine this week, be sure to get a good lungful, eh?
Ah
Have you ever tasted air so fresh you gobble and gulp it down?
I heave it greedily into my lungs, stretching my ribs ‘til they ache.
This isn’t how it works, I know. But
I imagine the oxygen bubbling into my blood and racing through my veins,
chasing the heaviness out, out, out
until steam hisses from my ears
until my heels lift and I balloon skywards.
In, two, three, four.
Out, two, three, four.
Here, it’s as much a pastime as a lifeline.