At last the house is quiet and still. Well, mostly. There’s a cricket outside the living room window chirping incessantly and the Lady of the Manor is in the recliner reading a book and yawning occasionally. Earlier today there was a small family gathering here to celebrate my birthday belatedly (the momentous occasion of my having made another successful trip ‘round the sun again occurred this past Tuesday). The wife served up a nice baked pasta with chicken meal (kinda like a casserole, I suppose) along with Caesar salad, garlic bread and for dessert a choice of chocolate cake with fudge icing, carrot cake and vanilla ice cream. All of it chased down by either sweet tea or ice water. Quality family time followed the eating festivities. All and all a simple, low-key way to celebrate one’s arrival upon this planet.
Now, I debate how to best take advantage of these quiet ours. I am often torn between the desire to read and the urge to write or play guitar (I did some strumming on one of my acoustic guitars earlier and have the beginnings of a new song). As a working family man this is the common way my evenings end – arriving at the Quiet Hours tired from the long day yet eager to be productive in either reading, writing, rocking or all three. It’s too quiet to play guitar at this hour. Reading more than an hour this late will surely put me to sleep (and thankfully I got a fair amount of reading today pre-festivities). But writing at this hour? Aside from the general end-of-the-day depletion of full cognition, it’s the most opportune time to do so and I could probably eek out a few hundred words before full mental wariness takes hold – starting with this missive.
So that’s what I’ll do, I’ll work on the crime romance novel I’ve been plotting and outlining the last couple of weeks. After all, the wife now fallen asleep as I close this and I know had I cracked open a book I would soon succumb to the same fate here in the Quiet Hours.
Lost Signal 