sounds of life

In the next room I hear my wife counting cells. (It's the sound of a mouse clicking and a CPU fan like a jet engine preparing for takeoff. Metamorph uses a lot of RAM.)

The dog sighs, periodically, as if to say he grows tired of waiting for us to come to bed.

Though I can't hear it, approximately 100 billion of my friends of the genus Sacchromyces, species cerevisiae are happily converting sugar into ethanol and carbon dioxide, sugar water into beer, at the bottom of the basement stairs. (Close up, it's a gentle, steady bubbling.)

In my head I hear strains of Benjamin Britten's War Requiem, which I just spent a couple of hours rehearsing.

There really is no such thing as silence. But it is golden, sometimes.