Life Matters

A Twilight Zone morning

By Linda Petersen
Posted 8/22/18

Hubby gets up at 5:00 a.m. to go to work, and most of the time I can fall back to sleep. This morning was not one of those mornings. Lumbering out of bed to make my morning tea, I sat in Hubby's huge, brown Laz-E-Boy chair made for larger bodies.""

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Life Matters

A Twilight Zone morning

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Hubby gets up at 5:00 a.m. to go to work, and most of the time I can fall back to sleep. This morning was not one of those mornings. Lumbering out of bed to make my morning tea, I sat in Hubby’s huge, brown Laz-E-Boy chair made for “larger bodies.” Melting into the seat, the scene from our picture window caught my eye. We live on a tiny pond, and the water was like glass, real glass. Not a ripple or a wave, an oscillation or an undulation. Pure glass, as though one could walk across it with ease. Upside down reflections from the houses on the other side of the pond mimicked the solid ones that sat above them. The cacophony of colors would have made a great jig saw puzzle.

The stately oak trees in our backyard were also silently still. Not a branch or leave moved, as though frozen in place. A few dry, dead leaves hung from branches, as though glued on, with no movement in sight. The toddler swing, suspended from a huge branch, was motionless, without a sway or a shiver. It was usually wildly swinging back and forth, fueled by a toddler with so much energy she could be of use by National Grid. But today it sat still.

The phrase “the silence was deafening” did not describe what I heard in the quietness. Unexpected sounds came; a slight ringing in my ears never before noticed and the hushed sound of the refrigerator in the other room. The movement of the fan blades in the kitchen whiffled around in a pattern; swish, crick, swish, swish crick. The house even creaked a few times, a preamble in movies announcing incoming spirits. The usually busy street outside was barren; not a car drove down nor an exerciser walking a dog passed by our front door.

It was obvious something would break the silence, and that something was the sound of the aircraft that flowed down from overhead. A big plane, a tiny plane, a bigger plane, and the bumblebee buzz of an even tinier plane. One after another, the overwhelming noise of the planes bombarded me. Living near the airport, the sound of planes should not have been a surprise, but on this day it was. The noise seemed amplified as well as the frequency of the take-offs, sounding like a War of the Worlds event. The zoom and loud whizzing of the raucous planes filled the air with the sounds of their engines, breaking the previous silence in an astounding manner.

After about an hour, the sounds of planes softened. A bright, red car drove down the street, followed by another one in the opposite direction. Two women walked by, one walking a poodle and the other one walking a “no name” type of dog. Looking outside in the back yard, I could see the tree branches and the toddler swing swaying slightly. Ripples eased their way through the pond, with an occasional turtlehead poking up through the water. For some odd reason, I could no longer hear the refrigerator or the fan in the other room. For me, this was no conventional morning. It was an imagined episode of The Twilight Zone.

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