In moving from the city to a small village—and especially into an old house—silence has become one of the most important things to me. Still, I feel it’s worth taking a moment to clarify what I mean by silence. I touched on this a little in my very first blog post.

Over the course of my life, I’ve lived in very different soundscapes. I spent my childhood in Joutseno, in South Karelia. The name of the local post district, Rauha—‘peace’—is a fitting word for an area that stretches along the shores of Lake Saimaa, surrounded by lush nature. And yet, it also lies between the eastern railway line and Highway 6. You grow accustomed to passenger trains rushing by on schedule and slower freight trains rumbling past just 200 metres from the house—making the ground tremble a little, and the windows and the glass in the cabinet too. The steady hum from the highway is something a local hardly notices.

I also spent a while living in a city centre before moving to Impiö. In Oulu’s grid-plan downtown, at a set of traffic lights on Aleksanterinkatu, the soundscape was intense enough that I doubt I’d grow used to it anymore. Especially on summer evenings—the heavy thump of bass, and the revving of a motorcycle engine in anticipation of the lights changing, making sure the takeoff would be as showy and loud as possible. It started to get a bit much, particularly since the bedroom faced the intersection and the summer heat forced me to keep the window open.

At Mattila, when you sit down and allow yourself to unwind, you begin to notice the sounds of silence. Yes, you read that right—silence does not mean the absence of sound. Before I grew used to it, the silence almost roared. I could hear the hum of my own body in my ears. The ticking of the kitchen clock. I heard what couldn’t be heard. There is no electrically powered ventilation at Mattila, nor air source heat pumps—which, I’m told, are very quiet these days. Maybe they are, but there have never been any at Mattila, and there won’t be. This is a kind of silence I intend to hold on to. My house is healthy. The log walls breathe, and gravity takes care of the ventilation.

And what about outside? Silence is full of different, shifting sounds—sounds that belong to a small but lively village. The early-morning concert of birds. The quiet chatter of youngsters waiting for the school bus. The occasional rumble of tractors. Moped boys and the joy of revving engines. Voices calling out from yard to yard. In summer, the singing of lawnmowers, brush cutters, and chainsaws; motorboats and jet skis. Snowmobiles roar in winter. The crack of gunfire during hunting season. Even the thump of bass now and then. The Hornets from the Lapland Air Command overhead. And the joyful shrieks and laughter of friends, relatives, and children.

How can something like that be called silence? Quite easily, I think. There is no constant background noise. Between the sounds, there is silence. The sounds come—and then they go.

Do you see what I mean? Does my definition of silence make sense to you?

Tintti