this morning i wake to the sound of my father turning the pages of the paper in the other room. the lift of his coffee cup, its rattle on the way down. these are the things that shake me from sleep. not the blended cry of all the birds in the trees outside this window, nor the drip drip drip of the leaking pipe on the far wall. it is the familiar sounds, the ones that i am hearing now and will likely not hear again, the ones that fill this house in this last time, probably, i will live here. i wonder if i might wish to preserve them, somehow, before they are lost to me? if i would know them, when i heard them? i wonder which ones might be precious and which ones better left, to vanish, in the hallways of this house.