A Great Silence

"It is so quiet", I said to my husband, when I ventured out to our back yard on Saturday. We arrived home just before midnight on Friday. For two days I struggled with jet lag, wandering aimlessly from an unpacked suitcase to unread mail to a congested e-mail, briefly unpacking a few items, sorting some of the mail, and  deleting many unnecessary e-mails. In between these frustrating tasks I went back to our comfortable water bed, trying to sleep away jet lag, a nagging back ache and an equally annoying cold that I added to my baggage from my last day in Vienna.

We left South Dakota during the balmy days of September. The migrating birds were clustering at the feeders and bird bath, the bees were busy at the last of our summer blooms, neighbors were gossiping over the back yards, and the diminishing tourists were still browsing the streets and enjoying our restaurants, Mammoth Site, river walk and the healing waters of our Plunge.

Saturday I went into our back yard to replenish the bird feeders, strangely quiet. All of our sunflowers had turned to seed and only a few flowers were bravely blossoming after one early frost. The bees were quiet in their hive, some emerging in the late morning when the sun shone and warmed up their home. The neighborhood was quiet, the streets mostly deserted, and the voices of children were oddly absent. On Sunday morning we walked to a local restaurant and it, too, was largely empty. We saw two tourists at one table, several lone retired type men and one other couple.

When I complained about the silence my husband reminded me that we had left a group of 170 people, bustling cities and capitals and international airports. We had been gone from our small community for almost three weeks. longer than we had ever traveled on previous vacations. Perhaps it is the striking contrast to our whirling travels plus the sudden change from leaving in September to returning in the middle of October that has me repeating,, "It is so quiet!"