Beech Tree News Network

In John Irving’s book, A Widow for One Year, a little girl tells her father that she sometimes hears a disturbing sound in the night.  When he asks her to describe the sound, she says, “It’s the sound of someone trying not to make a sound.”  I have lived in that particular twilight, and with a young granddaughter in the house, I sometimes still do.
    When my children were toddlers, I lived for nap time, although it was a bit of a Catch 22, because not making a sound is harder than it appears.  I have no idea how Santa pulls it off.  Yes, you can sleep while they sleep or read a book or watch TV on mute while you read the captions, but just about anything else requires noise.  If the weather is nice, you can work in the yard, but if you’re like me, you’ll wear yourself out running back and forth to check on them.  I used to creep with the stealth of a Ninja wearing Indian moccasins back to where my kids were sleeping and peer through the not-completely-closed door to make sure their tiny chests were rising and falling, signifying that, yes, they were still breathing.  My friend, Jeanne LeBlanc, used to hold a mirror under her kids’ noses while they slept to check for signs of life.  That wouldn’t have worked with my kids, they didn’t sleep that sound.
    While my daughters were growing up, we spent many a weekend on the road to Alabama, where my husband, Garey’s, family lives.  Looking back on it, I wish I had said, “Honey, you go ahead and take the kids to see their grandparents, I think I’ll stay here and clean out the septic tank, and that manure really needs to be shoveled out of the barn.”  Trust me, it would have been much easier. My children barely slept while we were there, which meant I barely slept while we were there.  Garey, on the other hand, slept like a—I started to say “baby” but that’s really not an accurate analogy (wonder what idiot came up with it)—guy who didn’t have to contend with two fussy children. 
    Garey’s parents lived in a small two-bedroom house, built in the forties, before people put insulation in their walls.  You could hear everything, especially in a house where there were no sounds of people trying not to make a sound.  Agnes, Garey’s mom, couldn’t be quiet if you paid her to do so.  She would get up in the mornings to fix breakfast, banging pots and pans, rattling dishes and scraping metal spoons against iron skillets—that was with me reminding her the kids were asleep as I helped her cook.
    Garey’s dad, J.D., had thirteen bird dogs—it seemed like that many, at the time—in a pen right outside the window.  They barked and howled all night, except for the short intervals when J.D. would get up, stomp through the house and yell, “Cut that racket out!” from the back door.  I was exhausted by the time we headed back home.  I would have slept on the way back, but my youngest daughter had colic and would cry all the way to Alabama and all the way home.  Trips to Alabama are not among my fondest memories.
    With a young granddaughter in the house occasionally napping, I find myself once again in stealth mode.  Even if my daughter is in the house at the time, and she is responsible for her care, I still try to be quiet.  I take off my shoes and walk barefoot; I stop the microwave before the buzzer goes off; and I watch TV on mute, reading the captions.  It’s not so much that I’m that considerate; I’m just hedging my bets.  I don’t want any bad karma to send me back down the path I’ve already traveled.  If it does, I’m cleaning out the septic tank this time around.