The marvel of quiet

September 3, 2026

I knew I was back in Hyde Park when I heard the irritating squawk of a monk parakeet through my open window as we drove east on 55th street. I always felt so at home returning from Midway Airport down the boulevard, past the Mexican markets and the carnitas places, the more or less permanent yard sales, the flower sellers, raggedy beckoning city parks, past the Catholic churches that managed to combine the current Mexican and former Polish neighborhood ethnicities, past even one new Venezuelan restaurant.

The parakeets are, I suppose you’d say, an invasive species on the south side and now all of Chicago, an entire community established from one escaped pair, so the myth goes. They created 8 foot tall, apartment-style stick nests in Hyde Park starting in the ’70s, learned to forage off the ground like pigeons, figured out how to survive a Chicago winter, and multiplied by hundreds. The powers that be decided they were a problem, so either the electric companies engaged in wholesale nest removal, or peregrine falcons were introduced to the neighborhood, depending on who you talk to, and indeed they disappeared from Hyde Park.

Turns out they just moved to the west. I love hearing their terrible racket. It makes me feel like I’m in the right place.

I had just returned from a week in Maine. On an island. In the ocean. There are definitely no monk parakeets in Maine. I saw bald eagles, loons, ospreys, seaside sparrows, and cormorants. Only the ospreys come anywhere close to the audio obnoxiousness of the monk parakeet but I heard them rarely. I heard the calls of two loons, one mourning dove, a variety of little wren-like and sparrowy grass-hopping birds, and a few bald eagles, who have a sweet sound, almost like a cheep cheep cheep, as if, Pam had said, they don’t have a worry in the world. It is the call of a bird that knows it sits at the top of the food chain.

Other than the infrequent bird song, the island was very, very quiet. The nighttime frog cacophony of southwestern Michigan is not operative here. There was only a half-hearted cricket chorus, maybe more of an occasional cricket barbershop quartet. I heard no cicadas, whose hollering in Chicago regularly reaches almost 100 decibels, comparable to a lawnmower or a jackhammer. Of course no sirens, no barking dogs, no gaggles of students shoving each other, shouting, laughing on the sidewalks and spilling into the street, no motorcycles of the night which race in aggressive wheelie-popping groups up and down Lake Shore Drive and then up and down my street. All these are the staples of a summer evening on my block. The soundtrack of my house. I confess it was a little hard for a city girl to adjust to the silence.

With only light winds whispering through grasses, and the murmur of gentle surf far out in the water, it was quiet enough in this isolated place finally to be able to hear.

I was in this extraordinary place, a writers’ retreat, to write. And to do that I have to listen.

The quietness was probably enhanced by fog. Certainly complemented by three meals a day offered by a brilliant cook, Carrie, for whom we had to do nothing at all but show up hungry. Upheld by 9 other writers who spent days writing in the quiet, women who stepped out of staggeringly busy lives for just a week to come to this wonder of a place with nothing to do for once, no one to be responsible for.

In the afternoons I followed the path around the island through unfamiliar and wild terrain, usually with a friend, but on one day stopping at a tiny table to sit for a couple of hours alone, watching for birds. The trail to get there featured cascading boulders, waist-high ferns, tall maritime pines and whispering birches. I sat in the quiet on a high bluff, waiting for birds. I held my breath when I saw unexpected sea creatures, hearing them before seeing them. Harbor porpoises made a loud, abrupt HUHHH when they surfaced. At first I couldn’t identify the source of the heavy sigh and wondered if there was a wild animal near by in the brush, or something worse, then I noticed that this sound coordinated over and over again with a porpoise arcing out of the water. Whew! The otherwise silent harbor seals surfaced with a sloppy plash, making it easy to turn my head towards the sounds and wait for the next time their sleek shiny rubbery heads popped up.

I listened, and listened, and listened. And spent the week writing what I heard.

The aforementioned Pam, the writer who imagined into existence this retreat called The Salty Quill, seems to have started from the premise that women don’t get a lot of quiet in their worlds. And she’s figured out how to supply it. This old, creaky, gorgeous Maine summer home on a private island is the setting. Writers don’t have to do anything at all; and the only ask, or suggestion really, was that we read to each other in the evenings–the things we were working on, or wrote a long time ago. Which was fascinating and wonderful. I loved hearing everyone else’s work, which was all so wildly different and all so beautiful.

This whole week was really, truly, purely, bliss. Friendly writers, mealtime laughter, tiny pinecones, goldenrod, bumblebees, sunshine, shadow, fog, full moon, bird book, yellow legal pad, Bic pen.

The only time it was not quite pure bliss was when I boarded the tiny SS Minnow-like boat for the first time and buzzed straight out into the unknown ocean. Or when, upon arrival, I opened my closet to find a big baby doll in a red dress with its severed head beside it. Or at 2 in the morning while I lay awake, trying not to think about that headless doll, or its head, wondering if I should use my chamber pot, go in the grass, or take the trek outside and back into the main house and up the stairs to the bathroom from my out-of-the-way room. Little things.

But it turns out neither headless doll, nor worrisome motorboat, nor bathroom conundrums bothered me inordinately. Because I had so very much else to hear in the quiet, to hear in that sunny span of a week. Now that I am back it is my goal–somehow–to import a little quiet back into my regular life.