It’s a quiet Thursday evening. I can make out the crickets and stillness. This is rare. Our neighbor and owner of the house we live in, Mzee Mbazi, has a small group of guard dogs that usually make listening to stillness impossible. They bark throughout the night. When I first moved here, I doubted that I would ever get used to it as our roommate Melissa had said she was. But now I am. But I still prefer this – now – this lack of sound, except for the crickets.

During one of the first months we lived here, I brought my recorder outside with me in the early morning. Every morning, as soon as I woke up, I made a visit to the outdoor squatter, and the sounds surrounding me at that hour astonished me. It was a cacophony of the wild, a natural symphony in my own backyard. The waking sounds of birds, insects, and other creatures unfamiliar to me. I wanted to capture this sound because it was no novel, so exotic. I don’t know what it is – if the dry season that we’re in now doesn’t sustain such a morning alarm, or if I’m just used to it now – whatever it is, I can’t hear it as well anymore. I go out to the squatter and the volume of nature seems turned down.

***

There’s nothing quite so satisfying as a finished round of hand-washed underwear.