Home Is Where the Noise Is

My tinnitus has been bad lately. It’s usually worse when I don’t sleep well or have just come in from outside. It seems to ricochet off the walls but really it’s the quiet: I notice it more. Of course, certain things can set it off, like opening a can of seltzer, or that awful auto-tuned stuff they play on Q99. Sometimes on Sunday afternoons, muscle-car guy two doors over revs up his engines, and the art work hanging above my chair rattles. Something about the frequency gets into my head and gives me a headache. Thankfully, he seems to start his cars up just to make sure they still work and it only lasts a few minutes. Still, I wish he’d find another hobby.

I like a lot of quiet these days. I used to turn on the TV or radio in the mornings to hear the news, but now I just sit in quiet, waking up, and starting to work a little before I go swim. I still enjoy a little music in the afternoons and TV at night. But otherwise, quiet. When I’m in pain and my nerves are on edge, sudden or loud noises startle me, causing me to gasp and jerk physically, a form of PTSD I think. Then I have to remind myself to breathe, and to relax. That it was only a noise, and that it’s going to be alright.

There is something about home where one knows all the noises. The same birds singing in the morning, that big bug in summer banging loudly into the windows around ten o’clock every night, the ratatat of the woodpeckers. The neighbors’ triplets out back with their laughter and squeals, and the occasional trumpet practice in some house down the street. I wish people did not use lawn services so often but that’s easy for me to say sitting here in my easy chair. Those guys are working hard making an honest living.

We’ve lived in our Blacksburg house for one-third of my life. It’s home, more than any other place I’ve lived. I know where all the floors creak. I try to avoid them early in the morning, but the one at the bottom of the stairs always gets me. I step gingerly but the floor groans with a high pitch every time. When we replaced the upstairs carpet one summer, we spent hours hammering all the floorboard nails down deeper to get the squeaks out, but within a year or two, they were back They had to - they belong to this place, just as much as we do. There’s a loud squeak at the corner of our bed I set off every night as I crawl in. In the mornings, I sometimes hear my wife’s feet skim across our bathroom floor. I put a pillow over my head, and try to doze off for another hour, but it makes me happy, hearing her.

When my wife goes on walks, I try to use the quiet to relax or work, but am always happy when I hear Ruby barking, telling me she’s almost back. It usually takes a few more minutes, because there is a reason Ruby is barking and it has to do with biscuits. It’s a happy noise. When the girls are home, there are more noises, more shuffling of the floors, wrappers crinkling, and watching School of Rock for the hundredth time. Noises of love, noises of joy. That’s home.

I’ve spent a lot of time these past two years thinking about my childhood, and in my mind’s eye, I can see many things, exactly as they were, down to the dents and scratches. But I can’t hear them. Those sounds are in the past. They are not home to me. The noises of this place, of this house, that’s home.

I know we will move someday. I know that home is not so much a particular house but being with the people you love. And that means noise.* Quiet is good for the soul, but not silence. Quiet is stillness, but silence is isolation. So let the sounds ring forth! Home is where the noise is.

* For those who are deaf, there are other ways to have noise - good noise - in your life. Stay quiet, but do not live in silence.