Write with Me Wednesday writing prompt: Write about silenceSilence is early morning—rosy gold peeking through gray, snores and shifting bodies upstairs. Silence is no interruption to my thoughts or actions. If the coffee grows cold, it’s my own fault.

I love the silence of early morning that isn’t really silence. The furnace hums (more and more often these days), the coffee maker sputters and drips and hisses, and some days the birds outside are downright raucous.

Is it ever really silent?

The house grows quiet when the power goes off, all the underlying hum we don’t notice until it is gone stops.

A house goes silent, beyond quiet, when somebody has died. Even when the furnace and the coffee pot and the birds keep doing their thing, whether or not the power is on. A silence envelops you. Nothing really fills it. You can turn on music or a TV, talk to people, fill up the house, but still a silence lingers. Even when the person missing is a baby who slept a lot.

It is perhaps an absence of energy, not noise.

I had to learn to love quiet again after my son died, because for a long time I remembered that empty silence. These days, I settle into quiet again, even seek it out, because as much as I love the noise and life and exuberance, I need the quiet too.

Today, I woke to singing in the next room. With the time change they are up before me. I miss my morning quiet, when the silence is broken only by snores and shifting bodies upstairs, the sputter-hiss of the coffee maker and the hum of the heat turning on. We’ll settle into new rhythms, and I’ll sit comfortably in that silence again.

What about you? Do you love silence or are you always trying to fill it?


Usually for Write with Me Wednesday, I share a prompt related to whatever I’ve written.

This week, I was stuck. I was staring at the blank page, wanting to just dig back into my past writing rather than write something new, so I looked for a prompt myself, something to get me started. This one is from Old Friend from Far Away:

Tell me about silence.