My favorite sounds

My Favorite Sounds

It's a typical fall day here in Southern California, as day lilies and roses continue to bloom. Temperatures are in the mid-eighties and our windows are open wide because there's a breeze blowing in off the ocean.

Eucalyptus leaves are clapping together, making a melody like they are God's own wind-chimes.

I hear them from every room in the house.

And the children are laughing.

Drinking sodas poolside and pulling funny faces.  Then darting inside from one bedroom or another, trading stickers and setting up Lego battles.  I imagine this sound must be top of every mother's list, the peaceful happy sounds of play.

And yet, conversely, I love the sound of babies crying.

There's something so pure and simple about a newborn's cries.  It's a cry for milk, for comfort, or for rest.  I know that cry in my own heart, and I get caught up in the complexity of my needs; then a woman passes by with her wailing one, and it all seems so simple again.

Milk - Comfort - Rest

So I turn the pages of my small leather bound Bible, because milk, comfort, and rest are waiting for me there.

And the rustling of Bible pages sings out like a familiar hymn.

When an entire room full of women turn in their Bibles to a specific passage, it sounds, I imagine, like the wings of angels rushing by.  But even one person, leafing through one Bible, is a song worth singing.

And so I turn each thin page carefully as my husband starts to strum his guitar and sing.

My husband's sweet and tender tenor voice is another one of my favorite sounds.

Though he doesn't sing often, when he does my knees go weak.

Then comes the quiet at the end of each day, when laughter and cries and rustling leaves, page turning and hymn singing all still.  And that is the most glorious noise of all.  Like a bath of stillness at the end of each blessed day.

What are some of your favorite sounds?