Quiet

Never have I spent so much time in the city as I have at this point in my life here in college. Many of you that are from here that I’ve told that to scoffed, Newberg is not a big city in their minds, but seriously… yeah it is. My home town has a total of 300 people if you round up. it takes at least an hour in either direction to get to another town that’s even mentioned on the map, and even then they are small in comparison to Newberg. My sports teams traveled up to seven hours away in the middle of the week to play another high school in our league, and no, we did not get to spend the night in a hotel or skip school the next day.

Thats the way it has always been for my small town family and I.

The one thing that I’ve noticed up here that just drives me up a wall is the noise. It’s continuous! It’s outrageous! Even in the middle of the night I can still hear people talking, and cars driving non stop to God only knows where. Even when there’s no noise there still is. The constant hum of city life and never-ending buzz of people surrounding me has me feeling like I’m in a fishbowl; there might not be a whole lot going on around me, but the constant whirr of the filter just won’t let me get some peace.

I keep pulling this memory up from far back in my mind of when I was a little kid. It helps me block out the noise of big ol’ Newberg.

My brother and I used to play hide-and-go-seek with our cowdog in the hay shed. What fun we would have climbing through the stacks of 1 ton bales and finding spots that were just big enough for us to squeeze our little bodies into. Max, who is now an old, grey-mussled, worn-out workdog would go sprinting through the maze of hay. He used his nose to find one kid, while the other was in hot pursuit right behind him. I remember the rush of blood that always rose to my cheeks and nose in those winter evenings making my face bright red with excitement. I remember the sting of cold air on my lungs as I attempted to control my breathing so Max couldn’t hear me in my hiding place.

The part I find myself recalling when I need to relax is actually what we’d do when the light from the sun dwindled in the barn. It got far too dangerous to climb through wobbly stacks of hay without the ability to clearly see holes that we could fall into and suffocate. My brother typically went inside at this point; it had gotten to cold for him. But I stayed and sat at the top of the stacks, looking out on the sunset, and my mountain, and our cows in the valley. The quiet engulfed everything. Snow fell so slowly. Once in a while a lonely bird would sing or a cow would bawl, but true quiet is what ultimately won the battle and took over. Sometimes the world was so still that I could make out the sound of our cows across the road (more than half a mile away) chewing their cud. My breath was silent, the only way I could tell that I wasn’t holding it in was the warm cloud that rolled out from my lungs and in front of my face.

This is what true calm and quiet are to me.