seasons of quiet

Dan seems to have caught some kind of bug--unlike his usual recreation in the evening, he was fading even as I put Andrew to bed and has been sound asleep for the past two hours. It's strange how quiet--and how lonely--our basement apartment seems when my husband and my children are all sleeping while I read through student papers. Paradoxically, although my mind is filled with the clamoring voices of my students and I can hear Dan's steady breathing in the background, what I really hear is a kind of stretching silence. It makes me profoundly glad that this silence is an aberrance, not the norm, for our household.