Summer Sounds

A soft breeze brings a susurration of leaves, but not much cooling as it enters through the screens.  With the windows open, we’re more aware of sounds – a car passing, a toot indicating one of the Captain John boats is leaving the wharf, the drone of an airplane overhead.  They bring the memory of older summer sounds. Sometime in the past the whir of a rotary lawn mower changed to a motor noise.  I no longer hear a radio announcer describing a ball game.  Television baseball isn’t the same.  I wonder if they had a special microphone pick up the crack of the bat. The music of the ice cream truck now has an electronic tone, but voices of children on a summer evening are the same. 

Following my “procedure” in the hospital, I’ve been staying at my in-town home, but the beach cottage has its own familiar sounds.  The surf on a night of east wind is one of my favorites.  The mutter of a lobsterman’s boat as he pulls his pots in the dawn light mixes with the music of song sparrows and the laughing gulls’ humorless “har, har, har.”  Later children on the Lobster Tales boat squeal when the pot is opened and creatures of the deep are revealed.  They return to port to the strains of he Hokey-Pokey, and I smile to imagine them doing the dance.  In the evening, as we drift to sleep, crickets chirp in the beach grass of the dunes and a mouse skitters in the loft above our heads.

I hope soon to be back.