Fragments From Floyd

It is a silence unlike any other--not only a place where there are suddenly no sounds of voices, of clinking coffee cups and clicking keyboards. This is a silence of being, an emptiness of a self alone where moments before there had been others. The kids just left to return to Missouri, so I guess this is it, the end of a chapter, the beginning of that void of empty calendar that has loomed just the other side of Joe's wedding, then Nates and our seeing family in Saint Louis all too briefly, then the newlywed's visit here, also brief. And now there is only me in an empty house and all the sounds, all the thoughts and words, are mine. And I will learn again to be content with the nouns and verbs that my fingers make, that my eyes read back to me, that feel only faintly like unsilence and faintly like purpose.

And yet, there is a kind of solace in solitude for which I am truly thankful. Even now out my window, the silent drama of winter flails at the maples along the road less than the pines on the ridgetop and there is motion. The creeks run under ice and cry the muffled commotion of an infant river confined in crystal, just the way those embryo streams have done now for seven Decembers in this place. There is comfort in the sameness, even if there is no one to share it with. But while the house was full, we didn't take time to hear these things. Now that they have gone, this is all I can hear. Now that those known events have passed, the calendar is as empty and white as an Arctic plain in the sunlight. Features will rise up in time, but for now, the barrenness of obligation and engagement hold a dessert kind of simplicity and beauty. This pleasant emptiness will go on, for an hour or a day, until the last reverberations of memory and sound disappear from these past weeks of wonderful hectic togetherness.

To everything there is a season: a time to be a parent, a child, a father-in-law; a time to be simply a man alone illuminated by the flashes of sun through racing clouds that ride ahead of the next cold front bringing a whistling winter down on Goose Creek once again.