There is a silence on these hot Hawaiian days, and a different smell. In a place where the windows are almost always open, the line between inside and outside is often blurred. There is sand, dirt, and sunlight under our avocado tree and under our kitchen table.
But on the days when it is too hot, we shut all the jalousies, which are made of frosted glass, and we cannot even see the outside, much less feel it. And we turn on the air conditioning and smell the smells of the house instead of the trade winds, and look at our walls instead of our mountains.
It’s hard to get used to, this shut in feeling, once you are out of the habit. And it’s quiet. The roosters are muted and the cars are a low buzz and not one single insect gets in and out.
We try not to fall into this habit, this confining space. We try to always breathe the air, even hot air, and listen to the noises, even the loud ones. Like our neighbor who, without fail, starts mowing during nap time, or our other neighbor’s dog, Lulu, who will not stop barking at the delivery trucks, or the ambulances that go screaming down our street from the station just a few blocks away.
But some days, like today, this stillness is its own beauty. When we got home today I shut those windows and turned on the air conditioning and found the comfort blankets and snuggled with each boy.
Not that it was easy. When you get so used to freedom and noises it can be hard to settle back down, and I had to use every trick in the book to get it to happen. But it was desperately needed after a weekend when the boys didn’t nap at all, and took hours to fall asleep every night. After a Sunday night when Lincoln asked for underwear for the first time when a guest was over, and then, you guessed it, promptly peed on the floor 5 times in a row in front of her. After they both actually fell asleep at the same time yesterday 15 minutes before we had to leave the house. After Eliot decided to get four teeth at once and sleep maybe 5 hours last night.
Some days this cool air, the quiet, this reclusive moment, is what can get us through to the next one, which will be fresh, hot, and noisy once again, and the stillness is worth fighting for. Because in the quiet, I can believe it will be easier in the next moment. That’s the beauty of those confined spaces.
But the truth about confined spaces is that their beauty doesn’t last. And soon if we can’t get those windows open again and can’t laugh loudly and can’t see those mountains, we won’t make it either. In our house at least, we need some breaks from those big spaces, but the big spaces are where we survive, where we live and grow, and most of our problems in our family happen when we don’t have those places. When our jobs feel too small, when our purposes feel too unimportant, when our toys and dreams and the lingering scent of last night’s dinner are all familiar; that is when we start to fail.
So just for an hour, maybe two, we close the windows, in order to find the courage to open them back up again.
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