Guest
List of Sounds: - the gentle crackle & snap of a winter fire, which was in summer an unnoticed and unacknowledged necessity but has become now a motherly protector, whose nurturing warmth and maternal murmurings offer company and comfort through countless cold hours, whose presence (like a matriarch) is so central to the life of the family that it is the glowing sun around which everyday joys and sorrows and hardships and pleasures revolve - the ticking of an heirloom grandfather clock, placed in the kitchen not from lack of love but from its abundance, since it is here that the clock's slow measure of minutes is most useful, heeded, and appreciated: the kitchen is the heart of this home, and the clock is its heartbeat - the night-songs of the cottage's wooden beams, a creaking lullaby so familiar to its residents that their sleep would be oddly restless, in ways impossible to discern or articulate consciously, without the soothing, low sighing of the house settling deeper and deeper into the cradle of the su
