A sound from long ago found its way into my head recently. I’m not sure why, I’m not sure how, but I can hear it. I can hear it like I heard it many years ago, even though many years ago I didn’t know I was listening to it. It was just there. It was just there like so many other things that are just there that we don’t know we are going to need or want later. So it goes.

The rattling of a pane of glass in the window of an old wooden door. A wooden door that sticks a little, so you have to lean into it a bit to get it to open. You have to put your scrawny 12-year-old shoulder into it as you turn the knob, and as your scrawny 12-year-old shoulder presses against the door, your ear is drawn close to the windowpane. The windowpane that rattles a bit. Not a lot, but enough to be heard 40 years later.

The reason I pressed my scrawny 12-year-old shoulder into that door as I turned the knob, the reason my ear was drawn close to that rattling windowpane that I hear now, was because my Grandpa Fritz’s woodshop was on the other side of that door. On the other side of that windowpane that announced your arrival with a bit of a rattle…not a lot, but enough to be heard 40 years later.

40 years later…the woodshop, the door, the windowpane, and my grandpa are no more, but the sounds have found me again. The sound of the saws, the sound of the hammer, the sound of sandpaper…the distinct sound of silence from my Grandpa Fritz. A welcoming silence. A silence that I would try so very hard to quietly ease into despite the glass pane announcing my arrival.

I didn’t know it then, but I see it now, my Grandpa Fritz was the first person to teach me the beauty and necessity of solitude and that it was permissible to be silent in the company of others…permissible to just be. Grandpa’s woodshop was a place that I knew I could just be, before I even knew that sometimes I needed to just be.

A welcoming silence. He never looked annoyed that I had entered his sanctum, he would just glance up from whatever it was he was creating, and in that glance, when his silent “welcome” washed over his kind eyes and to his warm smile, I knew…I felt…without a word…that it was okay for me to just sit…to just be.

The sound of a rattling windowpane in an old wooden door. A wooden door that sticks a little. Lean into it.