The breeze, borne of the ocean just over the distant pine covered hills, pulses over me every few minutes, an alternating temperature to the warmth of the sun on my skin. It rustles the leaves of the tomato plants and hedge and bounces through a wind chime someplace in the distance with a musical result.
The smell of warm wood is seasoned with the spicy notes of the sun-roasted tomato and basil plants. Someone's BBQ is heating up and casting the smell of hot charcoal into the air. These are the obvious, the loud, smells. The dogs, basking beside me, have busy nostrils as they parse a thousand breeze-brought nuances of scent I cannot decipher. Rich as my nostrils feel in this summer moment, they are paupers of scent next to those of the dogs.
Someone is mowing their lawn. Again, from some distance away the sound floats over the hills to where I sit. Similarly, I can hear snatches of children playing someplace off to my right down the hill, along with now-and-then notes from someone's music - maybe from the same yard?
A neighbor two houses down, a Seinfeld-ian "loud talker," must be having a cell phone conversation in her yard. I listen in on half of her blaring conversation for a few uninvited minutes until the acoustic winds shift and her noise blows elsewhere again and I am left with the chuga-chuga-chuga of a lawn sprinkler at work. All this until a small plane flies slowly over, it's sharp-roared engine cuts across these other sounds as easily as its wings slice through the cloudless blue sky that upholds it.
Because I am sitting so still, a hummingbird braves my proximity to flit in and out of the fuscia blossoms hanging from the planter to my left. If I turn my head very slowly I can watch it work as the sunlight creates a fluorescent light show across its iridescent feathers. The steady drone of its furious wings creates a two-note chord with the buzz of bees who also service the flowers.
Just as flitting as this hummingbird, snatches of childhood summers slip in and out of my awareness, conjured by a sound, a smell, the warmth: the feel of walking barefoot on a warm lawn or tender footed among the pebbles at an icy river's edge, accidentally stepping barefoot on a sun-warmed still-fresh cow patty in a pasture (at once unpleasant and also, if I am honest, warmly luxuriant as it oozed between my toes), floating slowly down a summer river on an inner tube, half in and half out of the of the cool dark green water.
So here I sit on a beautiful summer afternoon, still of movement but busy of sensory awareness. Like the redwood tree in Dana Gioia's poem, Becoming A Redwood:
Stand in a field long enough, and the sounds
start up again. The crickets, the invisible
toad who claims that change is possible,
And all the other life too small to name.
First one, then another, until innumerable
they merge into the single voice of a summer hill.
I could quietly sit here for hours, I could become that redwood, but I know a timer is about to go off and then I will need to get up to brush butter over the small rounds of rising dough destined to shortly become fresh hamburger buns.
Today's soundtrack:
- all summer's local sounds
- Posted via Hermes.
No comments:
Post a Comment