Blessed Silence
Silence is golden. To hear sounds dulled by distance, and be surrounded in the immediate vicinity only by one's own small sounds; the rustle of fabric, the air rushing through the nose, the tickety-tack of the keyboard, an occasional expletive when the wrong key is pressed, the clicking of the second hand on the clock. One's thoughts coherently appear, undiluted by unnecessary noise, pristine as the cold morning. That is my state on most mornings. When my husband is home, however, things change. The television is turned on. While I don't mind sharing my quiet mornings with my husband, the television is a little island of noise that intrudes on my thoughts, which are then interrupted as small, unasked for items drift in. In the morning I do not care to know how the stock markets are opening in Europe, or how they are closing in the Far East. I don't care about how they are going to "investigate" the latest exorbitant rise in electricity costs, or what one po...