This house is seldom quiet. In the morning, before the city settles into its humdrum workday, it rattles with the subway cars tearing the tracks beneath it and the cars pushing and screaming their horns in the thick traffic. Then, when the city does settle, every two or three moments are marked with an old car dragging its transmission on the gravely road or kids shouting after a lost ball or a great truck moving slowly and bellowing in a giant’s voice. In the evening it’s the same: the subways cars shaking the foundations of the earth and the many cars above grounds rattling and crying like a mob in an earthquake. In the late evenings it’s the kids with their loud cars stereos: in the night, the drunkard hobos fighting over the best benches. Always someone around, making sound to let you know they’re there.

Then it gets quiet, for an hour, for a morning if you are indeed in luck. Maybe it’s a Sunday and nobody goes to work; maybe the snow fell thick last night and all the cars are stranded. In those rare moments you can hear the many birds chatting in that one tree next to the house, and they are nothing like the birds you knew as a child in the country. They’re louder and they all chirp at once, never conversing in their bird tongue, as if oblivious to the sound of others. In those moments you realize that in this constant city noise, all the birds have gone deaf.