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I’m sitting in my study looking out at the stormy Spring morning, thinking about how quiet it is so early in the day.
A family of wrens is happily calling “tea-kettle, tea-kettle, tea-kettle,” so maybe the rain will hold off a while longer. Except for the wrens, a droning airplane overhead, and the occasional tapping of the keyboard keys, it’s quiet.
As I sit here admiring a cluster of spiderworts heavy with purple blossoms, and marveling at the birds, I realize how seldom my life holds so little noise. Most of the time I hear a whole orchestra of competing sounds, all tuning up together — my daughter’s rhythmic gymnastics music; the churning and sloshing of the washing machine; Bella, my mini-schnauzer, yapping at some invisible threat out the front window.
So much of my noise is mechanical. As the day progresses, I’ll hear the telephone ring insistently and the buzzing of mowers and edgers from neighboring yards.
Maybe, because this is such a peaceful time with a breeze blowing through the crepe myrtle trees, I think of another writer, E. B. White, and the silence of his life on a salt-water farm in Maine. He had fewer and more soothing noises than mine.
As a little girl, I never paid the least attention to the crackling leaves underfoot or the scolding of a mockingbird in the brambles. I ran with abandon along the Chattahoochee riverbank, through the thicket with my sister Jane. I don’t recall a single bird sound.
The bottomland was filled with the excited laughter and chitter-chatter of our made-up games. We were the Lone Ranger and Tonto or Cavalry scouts with important missions, turning the tranquil piney woods into chaotic battlefields. There was no time to listen. The collective cheeps, chirps, warbles and trills of carefree titmice and chickadees were wasted on my youth.
Years later, when I was a student at Auburn and read Walden, Thoreau’s chapter on sounds helped me became a better listener. I learned that complete silence is rare. In a secluded spot, if I listen closely, I can hear the feathery rustle of leaves and a thump as a dead limb breaks away and falls. Some little insect might begin a thin high singing. A cricket starts his evening song —zih, zih, zih — like a tiny saw, pauses and starts again. And there’s the faint zzzzzz of a dentist’s miniature drill as a carpenter bee bores deep into a fence post.
As I twist my chair a half-turn, it squeaks. In my musing, I’ve forgotten the sky. I glance out the window again. The puffy cumulus clouds have turned an insidious charcoal gray. No birds sing or flutter. No leaf moves. The storm’s about to break, and soon, I’ll hear heavy rain hammering the rooftop. The wind will cry, and the thunder will boom like a kettledrum.
They never last long, these Spring storms. The light comes back to the sky, and all I hear now is the gentle gibberish of the dwindling rain.
Mary Belk lives in Auburn and writes a column for the Opelika-Auburn News.
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