Meanwhile an engine revved, the neighbors yelled, rap music played, a horn honked, and the taco truck passed by.

I drove down to visit my grandmother on Saturday.  Say what you will about the suburbs, but the thing that immediately strikes me when I go there is the quietness of the neighborhood.  Her backyard feels like an oasis.  Actually, it reminds me of the secret garden.  Not that it's not well-maintained, but that it's stuck in a time long past.

My grandfather loved fountains and he put two of them in the backyard way back in the '70s.  One is a lion's head on the far back wall that used to spout water into a ceramic pool.  The other is much larger and looks to me like a chess piece.  The bottom part where the water used to flow is surrounded by a short wall.  When I was little and we would come out to visit my grandparents, I liked to play by that fountain and pretend that the wall was the gazebo in The Sound of Music.  I would skip around on it singing "You Are Sixteen Going on Seventeen."  Sixteen seemed to be a magical age, full of possibility.

This past visit, I was in the backyard looking at those fountains sitting thirsty.  They are surrounded by enormous lemon and orange trees that are currently bursting with fruit.  Those trees, as old as the fountains, made for a nice paradox.

While I can still recall the sound of water spilling through the fountains-- a calm yet lively sound-- these days I can also appreciate the silence.

Shark's Teeth

Everything contains some
silence.  Noise gets
its zest from the
small shark's-tooth
shaped fragments
of rest angled
in it.  An hour
of city holds maybe
a minute of these
remnants of a time
when silence reigned,
compact and dangerous
as a shark.  Sometimes
a bit of a tail
or fin can still
be sensed in parks.

-Kay Ryan