Silent house

My children went back to school a week today – and in a less than a week, I’ll be attending induction.  Assignments, book lists, field trips and stern warnings about remembering our jackets…and that’s just for the adults.  First week of induction, and I’m going on a field trip to a wood near my home.  To write.  The first week and I’m already I’m looking at something that I do to relax.

But for the moment, all there is in the house blessed silence.
Well.  Sort of anyway.  There might be silence in the house, but inside my head there’s dozens of articles, blog posts, stories, novels…all clamoring to get out.  

Like my own children, they all want the attention that they deserve, but there’s only so much time I can spend with each before the next one pulls me off. 
Some, catlike, bring me trophies – images of the really important things – like birds left in the bath, or on my bed.  Sometimes just as gruesome.  Others bring me childlike sketches – outlines – some just whisper in the night – exhaling – sweet, soft.  
And when I’m lying, listening to my family breathe, and sleep the night away – some of them don’t sleep, and they aren’t – exactly my children.  They are the psychopath – the strange noises outside my door.  They whisper – beguilingly.  And as time passes, more of them gather – in the dark shadows of the corners of my room, I’ve been jerking awake, confused.  It takes a couple of minutes to get my bearings, but while I do, I scribble.
I’m pregnant with possibility, and frozen in the moment of knowing there’s never enough time.  And still the house remains silent.  Save maybe the scratch of a pen, the siren song of my printer, the staccato of my keyboard. 

And though the house is silent, and there’s noise in my head, I still have breathing space. I can always close the door, put the ideas away in their rooms for a while.