“We have no earlids.”
I read that sentence in two different sources, in a week during which I had suffered recurrent auditory assaults. Our Florida home is near a freeway and the steady whir of traffic is my soundtrack. In a fit of collusion, our neighbors took advantage of the clear weather that week to use power generators, concrete pumpers, weed-whackers, pressure washers, skid steers, and chainsaws.
We can’t close our ears against noise as we shut our eyes to avert witnessing something, or plug our noises to avoid unpleasant smells. For those of us lucky to be hearing-abled, our only defense against audible onslaughts is deep sleep or good headphones, which might explain why so many people wear them as an accessory now. They’re replacing unwanted noises with chosen sounds.
In a way that’s what I do when I go to our Italian home, Casa Pace e Gioia, in the countryside hills of Le Marche. Even though our house is close to a road, it’s not often traveled and I can predict who’s driving by the sound. The cowbells that jingle across the valley bring me comfort. The woodpecker’s tap-tap-tapping each morning nudges me awake. Unfamiliar birds chirp as they flit about, a new soundtrack to learn.
I had been taking pictures, crouched down in our grapevines, when I heard an animalistic, metallic sound. I stood up and surveyed the area. Nothing. No stray fox or cat or deer, all of which I have seen among the vines. I bent down and heard it again. Above my head large grapevine leaves flapped in the wind. Grapevine leaves make sounds?
Without the whine of an air conditioner, we sleep with the windows open. Dogs near and far bark in an animated discussion I do not understand. Rhythmic beeps we originally thought were hunter’s beacons became Scops owls, calling as they hunt. An unidentified animal that shrieks in the night we now recognize as a little owl.
As I hang laundry on the clothesline one morning, Colmurano’s church bells chime eight times. I always count, then check my watch, as if to audit their timekeeping. But the bells give me a pause to be present. The wind hasn’t picked up yet; my pinwheel is silent and motionless. The farmer’s tractor whines by, an empty trailer clangs behind. He takes a left at the bottom of the hill, then ascends it to collect the alfalfa bales that had been sitting like monopoly houses in the empty field.
One of our guests had left a pair of headphones at the house. “I don’t know why I took noise-cancelling headphones to the Marche,” he wrote me, “there’s no noise to cancel.” He’s right, there isn’t noise. In Le Marche we appreciate peaceful sounds.
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