Before moving to the Berkshires we lived for many years in a suburb of Boston. While there are many wonderful things about living near a major city quiet was not something we found easily around home. I could go to places that were quiet, but home was not one of those. We lived on a street that was lined with pastures but we learned too late that it was also a shortcut known by locals between two towns. Swish, swish, swish was a most common sound at all but the deepest hours of the night. Plus the flight paths to Logan and the interstate in the distance provided for fairly regular low level, and sometimes not so low level if noise.

Over the years I found this wearing and one of the several things on the list of musts when finding a new home in the Berkshires was quiet.

Now nested against woods on a dead end street and the nearest interstate 15 minutes away and state highway at least a mile and jets that only pass over at 30,000 feet, the sound of nature is dominant. As I have written before, nature is by no means always quiet but it is rarely jarring.



But one of the sweetest sounds is one not from nature but one I hear mostly in the middle of the night and when the windows are open [which is May to October] since we don’t need air conditioning.

In the stillness and dark of the night the bells of the "Church on the Hill" a few miles away softly chime the hours. Floating across town over the hills and trees the chimes seem the sole guardian of the passing of time through the night. Drifting awake I count the hours and then drift back to sleep in the peacefulness of the night knowing that daylight is still a while to come.