One of the things I love most about living on the ranch is the quiet. When I am here alone, I typically leave the radio and the television off most of the time and enjoy the silence. Or at least I thought it was quiet here, but that was before I went to the Pruett house.My entire family went to West Texas the day after Christmas to hunt mule deer for a few days. My husband’s birthday is two days after Christmas and all he wanted was for his kids to go hunting with him. We stayed in a house roughly in the middle of a 90,000 acre ranch between Alpine and Fort Stockton. This house was built by the original owner of the ranch, P.H. Pruett, thus the name. My research tells me the house was built in the late 1880s or early 1890s.To reach the house, we turned off the highway onto a county road, then after about ten miles of that, we turned into the ranch gate. About an hour of solid driving after passing the ranch gate, we reached the house—I kid you not! Yes, we did have to go pretty slow due to the rough ranch roads, but that does not negate the fact that this house is remote!The house, like many of its era, has an enormous screened porch which faces south and the prevailing breeze. On the porch are some benches and I spent a good bit of my time on one or another of those benches. The view from the front porch is across a wide, seemingly perfectly flat valley. In the distance to the left are blue mountains and closer, the right are red rock bluffs. My husband had told me the bluffs were a spectacular sight when the light from the sunrise first hits them, so I was on the front porch waiting the first morning. That was when I began to notice the silence and the stillness.At my house, there are birds making their morning sounds then flitting about as the sun rises. My rooster starts to crow while it is still quite dark, then as it gets light the hens start making their waking-up sounds. The donkey huffs at me and the oryx make their mooing sounds. I can hear cars on “Interstate 500” as people commute to work. I hear ranchers honking up their cows. I often hear small airplanes buzzing over and occasionally have Army helicopters and fighter jets flying around. There was none of this at the Pruett house. I thought it was heavenly, but my daughter found it to be maddening.How often do we have an opportunity to experience that kind of silence and stillness? How many of us would want that opportunity? I know I relish the times when I can be surrounded by silence and stillness. One of my favorite Bible verses is from Psalm 46: “Be still and know that I am God.” In that stillness, I feel that I can know God, and that knowing wipes away the anxiousness and overwhelmedness that are so common in our time. Now if I could just time-travel to the Pruett house whenever I want. SpringCreekArtsGuild@gmail.com