Bombs were bursting in air over a neighborhood in southern Indiana; a hissing sound came from the roof as debris settled onto the house, the deck and the lawn. Inside the house that I was watching for my friend, her terrified Maltese dog hid under a bed, and her cat had disappeared into some room, somewhere. It was the weekend before July 4th, and before my friend’s neighbors began to bottle-rocket the sky, I had been enjoying the idyllic setting surrounding the house.
My friend is still settling into the house she bought about a year ago; one big change in her comfort zone is that she lives closer to other houses. Her previous home was on a hill at the end of a cul-de-sac, with a lawn that took three hours to manicure on a John Deere mower. Dense woods lay collected at the back of the property and neighbors to the left and right were quiet and seldom seen. Not so in the new property, purchased after her husband’s death.
“I don’t like sitting out on that patio,” she once told me. “People can see me.” A short fence at the rear of the property belongs to one neighbor, and she can hear another’s truck when it pulls into an adjacent driveway. She also said she didn’t like living so close that she could hear other people. I almost missed the comment over the barking of the Maltese. “I can’t relate to what you’re saying,” I told her. “I’ve always lived in a city, most of the time in apartments. I expect to see and hear people; noise is a component of community living.” My acceptance of that “component” was being rocked in July as bombs cracked and boomed, lit up the sky and rained debris across the neighborhood.
Later, I contrasted that suburban celebratory cacophony with the sounds of my own, “urban living,” which can include the hum and growl of cars on a racetrack and the late-night crash of train cars coupling. An airplane on approach to Indianapolis airport can be drowned out by the scream of the fire trucks that launch from a nearby station, and some days, someone sets alight a roaring engine that booms down the street and drowns out the chuckle of the motorcycle paused in front of the brew-pub.
But then, there’s this: the scream of jays as they alert the flock; the startling new sound of the winter wren, which sings from a branch low enough for me to touch; the call of the nuthatch, previously mute on the tree, and the percussive sound of Latin claves that is the hairy woodpecker breaking bark on a dying tree.
Living requires us to make noise of some sort, beginning with the first outcry of birth. I try not to separate and classify the various noises, but to weave them into a pattern that might be called “The Sounds of Life.” I have tuned out the crunch of gravel beneath my feet, a sound that stills the rabbit waiting for me to pass, a sound that fits as well in an urban environment as it does in suburbia. As I walk past a stand of bushes, startled birds burst into flight, leaving the bushes rustling; the creeping cat glares at me in angry disappointment.
My sojourn in Southern Indiana that included the neighborhood air shows, all sound and fury, made me realize that the “Sounds of Life” mean much more to me than does the sound of silence. I like the tapestry of sound and the occasional fury of fireworks.