I’m sitting on my back porch listening to the world wake up. I’m listening because it’s too dark yet to see anything. The lamp beside me makes the room around me bright, but the light stops at the screens and makes the rest of the world outside my windows as black as a cave.

So, I wait and listen.

I do a lot of listening. Always have. Sometimes I think when I listen. Like when I drive down the road, no radio playing, and my mind is mulling over everything under the sun. I think about the clothes I need to wash. I think about NASA making a way to Mars.

But when a fella really listens, he tries his best to keep his mind focused on what he hears. He sorts out the sounds and makes some determination of what he thinks it might be. He sees, not with his eyes, but with his imagination. Sometimes he can’t quite figure it out. Sometimes he draws from experience because the sound is familiar.

It can be kind of a game. Listening and not looking.

I was at a hotel one time for a conference. I found a shady spot on a bench outside the building during a break. A wooden privacy fence was behind me, and from beyond the fence I heard a familiar sound. The clank of metal. The clackity-clack of a gear turning. The roar of an engine. A high pitched beeper squalling.

In my mind I’m seeing a guy in work boots dropping the ramps on his trailer. He loosens the load binders. Cranks the skid steer and backs it off the trailer. This is the picture in my head. I haven’t moved from the bench. I’m gathering all this just from listening.

Curiosity gets me and I decide to go take a peek through crack between the boards in the fence. I’m positive it was a skid steer. It didn’t sound like a Bobcat. Might be a Caterpillar. They each make a little different sound.

When I peeked through the fence, I saw that I was mostly right. The trailer. The guy in work boots. The load binders were hanging from the side rail on the trailer. And it was a skid steer, but it was a New Holland. I missed it a little bit.

So, I’m playing the game of listening on my back porch. Everybody who visits here talks about how peaceful and quiet it is down here in my neck of the woods by the creek. But in the still of the morning, the world outside is full of sounds.

I can tell it’s wet outside by the sound of raindrops that pitter-patter through the trees. It’s not raining now. The pits and the pats are not steady. There are long silences. Then the wind rustles the treetops, and it sounds like a bucket of BBs falling to the ground. Some of the BBs fall into the creek. I can tell the difference by the sound.

The grey shadows of the woodland are getting brighter. Two squirrels are playing chase up the trunk of a white oak near the well house like their pants are on fire. I hear them before I see them. Up the tree at hyper speed. They circle the trunk thirteen times. Down to the ground and 30 feet over to the next tree. Repeat.

Over to my right and beyond my view I hear a thrashing through the tree branches. At first, I thought maybe a branch had fallen, but then a hawk appears with a crow hot on his heals. They swoop downward within three feet of the ground, then pull up in a steep climb like Top Gun. I can’t see them through the canopy, but they come to rest not far from the house.

It sounds like the hawk is tired of the chase. His high-pitched whine is raspy and uneven. The crow caws from a higher perch not far away. The hawk appears again headed for the clearing over the creek channel, and the crow divebombs the raptor. They roll mid-air and peel off to right and out of sight.

I never know what to expect on my early morning visits to my little corner of the world outside my porch, but I can always count on the songbirds. I’m so ignorant of their songs that I have the Merlin app on my phone to help me listen. The Cardinals and Carolina Wrens have been around since early spring. The Tufted Titmouse and the Pine Warbler make regular appearances. The Woodpeckers are here almost every day.

I almost never see them, but I can hear them.

By now I’m reading. My coffee stays hot sitting on my Mr. Coffee cup warmer. I can’t stand cold coffee, or even lukewarm coffee. Marion got me the warmer not long after we met. I kept getting up to spin my cup in the microwave a couple of times per cup. Now, my coffee is hot to the last drop.

The dawn is giving way to daylight. Most of the birds, squirrels, and raptors have moved on to more important things. Even the raindrops have quieted down. The woods seem to be at rest.

Out of the silence, I hear a crack. Just one pop, like the sound I make stepping on a dead twig when I walk through the woods. A few seconds of silence followed. Then came what I can only describe as a groan, or maybe a mornful moan.

The woods are dead still. No wind whatsoever. I sit up on the couch and turn my ear toward the screen windows.

Another crack, only this time it sounds like a gunshot. KA-POW. I can hear branches thrashing. The raindrops explode from the saturated trees. A couple more cracks and then a powerful but dull thump as if an elephant had fallen to the ground. A swoosh of air surges and then dissipates quickly, like a chipmunk diving into his hole.

I have heard all my life this question. One of life’s supposedly unsolved mysteries. If a tree falls in the forest and there’s no one there to hear it, does it make a sound?

I would argue that it does.

I have laid my head a number of different places over the last seven decades. I have heard the TV in the apartment beneath me. I have heard the sound of sirens and highway traffic outside my bedroom window. I have heard the neighbor fuss at his kids. I have been kept up at night by the sound of a guy working on his hotrod.

I have heard the tugboats on the river. I have heard the fireworks from a nearby stadium. I have heard the commercial airliners circling the airport. I have heard the warning call of a distant train horn.

It’s not that the woods are quiet. Ask any deer hunter, and he’ll tell you it ain’t so. It’s just that when the woods talk, they speak a peaceful kind of language.

Except when a tree falls to the ground.

No one around or not, it gets loud out here.