The Sound a House Makes When No One Is Home
A week spent listening to an empty house settle.
A house left alone does not go silent. It just stops performing for you, and starts making the sounds it always wanted to.
I house-sat for a week in a home whose owners had left everything running - the refrigerator, the furnace, a clock in the hallway that ticked louder than any clock has a right to. Alone in it, I started hearing all of it at once.
There is a specific groan old houses make at dusk as the temperature drops and the framing contracts, and I had never once heard it in my own house, because my own house is never that quiet for that long.
By the end of the week I had stopped flinching at the sounds and started, instead, cataloguing them, the way you learn the footsteps of someone you live with. I am not sure what to do with that knowledge now that I am home again.
