Stop and listen

A good friend once shared with me a little secret - it’s a good one too. Just stop and listen, no matter where you are at or what’s going on – just take a couple minutes, close your eyes and notice all the different sounds going on around you. Don’t focus on any one in particular, just listen to them as they enter and exit you mind. It’s quite calming and interesting. You really get a sense of what’s really going on. I’ve practiced this quite often since. In fact, I practiced it this morning around 3:30 a.m.

Erwert Residence 

Even though the sleeping arrangement is always the same with the UCE, the campsite isn’t. I’m set up in the driveway of my friends' Scott and Anna’s house in Woodstock. The camper barely fits - a couple inches away from their house, litterally. It always takes a little while to adjust, level the camper out, get used to where things are in your new surrounding and then level the camper out again. Anyway, it was my first night here and around 3:30 this morning, I woke up with that feeling of “where the hell am I?” Then I remembered... ok, go back to sleep. No such luck. So I began to just listen to the sounds. The first sound I noticed was Billie breathing fast – the way she always does when she’s sound asleep. Then there was the clock on the wall, a pine cone dropping on something metalic, a truck way off in the distance, the sound a sleeping bag makes when you shift…etc. It didn’t take long before I was about to drift back into sleep. Then it happened, the sound that reminded me of one thing, my roots. (I grew up in SE not too far from here) About a block away, I heard a car rev it’s engine to it’s redline and just dump the clutch, sitting there for what seemed like an hour burning it’s tires. Soooo high school. I imagined some kid in his beat up Honda Civic torturing the already tired four-cylinder engine just to piss off his girlfriend who told him to go home because he drank too much and was being an a-hole. After he was done with the show, he took off down the road slowly just to return from the other direction. Was he coming back to crisscross his charred tire marks in the street as to mark an “X”? He slowed to a stop and just sat there idling.  Great, round two. But no, he must have calmed down because he slowly drove away, sound drifting off in the distance. 

Welcome to Southeast.

I drifted back to sleep.  

This was left on my shave kit... living with Scott isn't easy