Silence

"Silence is a text easy to misread."
A.A. Attanasio 

I've often heard people negatively remark about couples sitting across from each other in restaurants who barely converse during their meal. "How sad that they have so little to say to each other... they must be so bored." 

I read a little saying the other day which might make one think twice before making such assumptions: "Some couples have grown comfortable enough with each other that they can take immense pleasure in being close without the need to fill the peaceful silence between them with unnecessary words."

Skip and I drove the "back way" home from Denver to Colorado Springs today. We chose to travel a rural two-lane highway rather than drive the 90 miles on the interstate where we spend 90% of the time dodging stupid, insane drivers and arrive home stressed and exhausted. For almost 45 minutes of our leisurely drive on this back road, the only sound in the car came from an oldies radio station I had found and Buddy, our Beagle, snoring in the back seat. Skip was reading one of his Clive Cussler novels and I was driving while gazing at everything - something I love doing when there's no traffic and the road takes us away from the busyness of city traffic. I loved the fact that we could share this space together and enjoy the silence between us without the need to converse.

I delighted in so much on this drive home. Colors. Things. Smells. Life.

Split rail fences, barbed wire fences, white wood fences - stretching for miles and miles in every direction. Marking boundaries. Keeping in the wanted. Keeping out the unwanted. Barns in every stage of decay, in various colors and shapes and sizes. Stacks and stacks of round hay bales, square hay bales. Fields of  brown sagebrush, and meadows of lush green grasses hanging on from summer. Horses, cows, goats. And an occasional hound dog. Aspen trees with leaves of gold, vibrant green pines, dead elms with their withered branches reaching skyward. An overall-clad farmer hunched over the wheel of his plugging-along tractor. A young woman in a fashionable jogging suit sprinting down the quarter-mile dirt road from her sprawling farmhouse to the mailbox by the highway. Hawks gracefully circling the open meadow for food. The carcass of a doe lying on the side of the road...a once beautiful creature who became the innocent victim of man encroaching on her territory. And the sky. The mountains. The incredible cloud formations. And the peace-filled silence between Skip and I. 

Then we turned off the country road. Skip closed his book, I paid more attention to the city-traffic and we started talking about how we should spend the rest of this wonderful day together.

Silences make the real conversations between friends. 

Not the saying but the never needing to say is what counts. 

Margaret Lee Runbeck