The coming of quiet

January 2, 2011, a calm descends. It’s been so long that I’ve almost forgotten what it feels like. I’m awed by the quiet that seems to bear a sustained quality. After a few minutes, I’m amazed it hasn’t gone away.

I’m taking down the tree ornaments. Henry was excited to help me begin the project. Mia was not. She went down and got the boxes I couldn’t reach though. I took the candles and centerpiece off the coffee table, laid it with a towel, and for a while Henry had at it, taking down his favorite ornaments and lying them gently on the towel. Then his mom came home and whisked him off for a couple of hours at the Mall of America and gave Mia a ride home on the way, and after a few minutes I felt the quiet of the empty house.

I kept at it for a while. I wanted to be sure the ornaments from my childhood got boxed right away. The rest were safe enough on the coffee table, but there was always the chance of one of the cats hopping up to sniff an angel or a bird, and so those cherished baubles with their memories had to be wrapped in tissue straight away. Then there was the one I had made after my dad died, the sappy Merry Christmas from Heaven that met a need for sentiment that year, and that was engraved. I had the box and it seemed as if every ornament was off the tree, but I couldn’t find that one.

I stood back, in the quiet, and looked top to bottom, side to side. I got up close. Finally I picked up lesser boxes – the ornament my mom gave me at the book-signing luncheon in 1997, the three kings from 1987. Each time I walked from coffee table to box, I searched the tree with my eyes for the engraved ornament that belonged in a thin rectangular box, maroon in color. It felt odd that it was the last one, the only one I couldn’t find. That it was still within the tree…waiting.

It kept me there, with the tree and the snowmen and the Santa faces and the doves for a few minutes while the house settled down with me, and we both breathed a sigh of relief. About then, the silver of the pewter showed itself within the boughs of the Frazier Fir, and I boxed it up, without reading the inscription, simply happy to have it back where it belonged.

Then I heated my cool coffee in the microwave, and spent that 60 seconds finding another ornament that matched another box, and when the microwave dinged, brought my coffee here as I do each day, and have done, all throughout the spastic tremors of the end of 2010, but without the quiet so long that I’d ceased to miss it, and thought I’d had it in bits and pieces, and realize again now, that I have not, and drink it in. Silence.