Sister is in New York City measuring noise.

This morning I knew it.

I was in the sun patch minding my own business and suddenly the air changed. Not weather air. Different air. The air that carries sister news.

She is there with equipment. Scientific equipment. Pointing it at taxi horns and construction sites and people walking fast in expensive shoes. She is writing numbers down. Decibel numbers. New York City makes specific sounds and she is catching them.

I can hear it from here.

Not the noise. The measuring. The sister measuring the noise. It has a frequency all its own and it reached Bend this morning at exactly 9:30 and found me sprawled across the hardwood where the light falls best.

Gus felt it too. He lifted his head from his donut bed. Looked around. Went back to sleep. Gus handles sister frequencies differently than I do.

I got up. Walked to the studio. Dad was at the desk. I looked at him. He looked at me. Neither of us said anything about New York City but we both knew.

The cookie helped.

Now I am back in the sun patch but everything is different. The light is the same light but it carries taxi sounds now. Subway sounds. Hot dog cart sounds. Sister sounds measuring all of it with serious equipment and serious numbers.

She is probably wearing her good boots. The ones that make proper city walking sounds. Click click click down sidewalks that never end. Past buildings that scrape the sky. Past hot dog carts that smell like everything I have ever wanted to smell.

The numbers she writes down become facts. Decibel facts. New York City noise facts that will live in official places and mean official things.

But I know the real measurement.

The real measurement is sister distance. Sister frequency. The specific sound of her being somewhere that is not here measuring sounds I can only imagine.

It measures exactly like this: one basset hound in a sun patch in Bend, Oregon, knowing without knowing how he knows, that his sister is in the greatest city on earth with equipment and notebooks and the best kind of important work.

The air still carries it.

I think it always will.

~P.W.