White noises
This late hour of the morning finds me at the dining room table (this giant house doesn't have room to put a table in the kitchen), surrounded by susurrations: the dishwasher sloshing, the washing machine humming, the wheels of quarry trucks, dense at this hour on the rural route past the house, peeling tacky-wet off the tarmac. The company--me, coffee mug, computer--is a peculiar arrangement of scheduling and indulgence; the house's other adult-body is at work, the full-time preschooler and half-time elementary-aged child are at their respective halls of learning, and the smallest, after a busy morning of managing to scatter body-generated gunk on bedsheets, pillow, favourite stuffed animal, pajamas, and downstairs bathmat (hence the whirring of the washer), has been allowed to run off with my cell phone for a half-hour of "alone time" with Peppa Pig. Duty says I should be hand-washing everything that wouldn't fit into the dishwasher, but pragmatics says the pipes in this old house are only so wide, and with two water-guzzling machines running at the same time, there's not enough left to rinse anything, so I'm forced to spend just a few minutes waiting for one thing or the other to run down. "Force" is a pretty lie: a collection of towering laundry baskets are waiting for their contents to be restored to their rightful drawers, 46 business-writing memos and 72 forum posts are hoping to be graded yesterday. And the small-sound-drowning impersonators of silence have been outclassed already anyway; Peppa Pig has been brought back down and is now merrily having her little adventures in the chair beside me, watched attentively by a sleepy-eyed girl bare-armed in a ruffled party dress, while the slush outside the window is added-to by a smattering of soggy snow.