Shifting Gears

The plate flips and lands on the floor with a crash. My expletive booms into the air, bounces off the walls and then, just as suddenly, the silence closes back in around me like a vacuum seal. Having jumped off the couch when I knocked the plate from its precarious perch, my heart still pounds. I looked at the upside-down plate, food scattered around. For a suspended second I listen, but no one comes, no one calls out. No one is here except me. A few hours before, someone would have clomped down the stairs to see if I was ok. Someone would have handed me a paper towel. There would have been a witness to my clumsiness, a recipient of my momentary irritation, a shared laugh to soothe it all away. But they are all gone. My sister is on her way back home across the country; my husband has flown off on business; my children are away at school.

In a house so often filled with others, there is suddenly just me. Me and my plate, on the couch.

Shifting gears has never been easy for me. Even though I have almost always driven a stick-shift, the car often lurches when I gear up, and gearing down is no better. Revving the engine just the right amount to move into a higher gear, or breaking, slowing down to smoothly put the car into a lower gear, is an art I have never quite mastered. As empty-nesters very well know, the months from November to January provide good practice in changing gears. Having just adjusted to sending the children off to college, the holidays bring them back, along with lots of other family and friends to juggle.

I admit to dragging my feet just a little back then, at the thought of the work ahead. We drop the new routines we have just adopted, and our relatively empty houses once again need us to orchestrate food in the fridge and sheets on the beds. Piles of laundry multiply and the house is full of voices. There is a charge in the air as we interact, a physicality to the togetherness as we all try to fit on the couch.

Then comes January, and they are gone. The motor is still in high gear, but it is time to gear it down, and then shift back into “me” gear. All the work I had put aside is still waiting for me patiently. I don’t have to check in with a houseful of people before making plans; I don’t have to coordinate schedules, meals or who has the car. In fact, unless I pick up the phone, I don’t have to speak at all. I can eat when and what I want, and watch whatever TV shows I chose. There are definite benefits to this, and I will relish it, I am sure.

But these first few days, when everyone first leaves, the quiet just booms so loud in my ears.