A Quiet Sunday Morning

My husband has noticed that, during the week, I usually wake up much later than he (his alarm is set at 6am and I'm out of bed around 7:30AM). On the weekends, something odd happens - I'm up no later than 7am. My only alarm is internal - so it must be my body telling me to get up and enjoy the peacefulness of a Saturday or Sunday morning in NYC.

I'm not talking about in Central Park or a coffeeshop - this peacefulness happens in my own apartment. When you live facing the West Side Highway and have a building of hundreds of apartments, here's what you get during the week:

There's a constant hum of cars, sirens, NYC busses, and delivery trucks buzzing by or droning their "I'm picking up speed in bumper to bumper traffic" sounds.

There's "I-can't-let-go-of-college" neighbor 11 apartments away who feels a constant need to yell at whomever he's speaking with down the hall.

There's the barking dog, left home alone each day, who must have vocal chords of steel to make that much noise each day.

There's the smoking neighbor - thanks to our cheaply built structure of an apartment, the smell of smoke seeps into our home office each day through the door jam in a bathroom. You can literally put your hand in front of the jam and feel the wind from an apartment above, or next to us, sucking the clean air out of our place and depositing nicotine-filled smoke back in.

There's the elevator ding. 7 elevators on our floor - 4 within auditory range of our front door.

There's the door slams. After all, everyone's door is on one of those hydraulic arms that makes it close automatically behind you - and imagine if people actually closed the doors instead of letting them close on their own.

It's not that these sounds particularly annoy me that much during the week - it's that I can sense their absence at 7am on a Sunday morning like today. This morning I hear the humming of my refrigerator, the humming of my computer, and can isolate 2-3 cars' wheels whirring by on the highway. Maybe that's why my internal clock gets me up so early on weekends.