Simple Gifts

[titusnowl]

Our little smoking room is a wonderful place to sit and read, with the window halfway open and the vertical blinds arranged to let in all the sunlight.  I've been living so divorced from the world here in Greenville; surrounded as we are by apartment buildings on all sides, and thrown into a completely new ecosystem with different rules for the seasons, I've lost all my connection to the land.  It's nice to reconnect a little by listening to the sounds outside, even if they are almost all man-made.  The rustling of the tarp thrown over the boat parked outside the window; the neighbor's muffled voices and the clinking of tools as they work on their car; the cries of hawks and other wild birds as they fly overhead; the soft rumble of trucks on US 69 just on the other side of the parking lot. It's a different mess of sounds than the ones I heard with my window open in our rural home in New York - there's no running water from the stream across the front yard, less variety of birdsong than came from the thick woods out back, and the cows here are more than a mile away so I can't hear them lowing (and I wonder whether these big brown steers make the same sort of noises as the familiar splotchy Holsteins back home).  It's still nice, though.