Learning As You Go          

      In the kitchen, which was always very hot, your mother banged uneven rhythms as she prepared elaborate dinners. She never wanted help; in fact she shooed you away--and that was why you sat on the back stairs and listened. You wanted to see if her rhythms could be understood--whether the way she pounded the counter could tell you anything about what she was cooking, how it would taste, how she felt about it, how she felt. After all, she was your mother.

     There were living things everywhere you looked in those days, from insects to birds to your mother and your dreams. The bones inside your body wanted to do other things than just be inside you, so they felt jumpy and impatient and made you want to fly, made you want to sing and dance and run everywhere. You’d heard about marrow, about the core inside bones, and you knew that birds’ bones are hollow. What then was marrow? Where the magic is stored. You sat on the back stairs and listened to your mother and thought about the magic deep inside your bones, as fireflies started to flicker in the dusk.

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One Place 

            ...the hedgerows actually had a sound...As bees

            buzzed and wood pigeons cooed, you could

            listen to God’s creation and take pleasure in its

            subtle variety.

                        --Robert Lacey: The Year 1000

            Certain places are defined by a relationship between sounds and silences that can awaken the body to its capacity for listening attentively, which is itself a charm to awaken the other senses. I think of the immense, humid silence that seemed to muffle our voices as my wife and I walked through the Fackatchee Strand, years ago, listening for breeze and Florida panther, coming across a small grove of thorny orange trees planted half a century earlier, long since gone wild but weighted with ripe oranges full of sour juice that tightened our hairlines and puckered our very brains; I remember the rumbling of thunder in the distance as we marveled at the taste of those sour oranges and felt for the first time the bites and scratches that scribbled our pale bodies; I remember the halo-hum of insects in the heavy air, the gargling splash of mullet moving through the brackish mangrove slough, the croak of alligators we took at first for horny frogs.

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