Traffic Sounds

Spring is here, and I am happy to open up all the windows and doors to let in fresh air. We live about 15 minutes from town, and the white noise of the freeway traffic is almost a constant during the day, with the exception of early morning weekends, especially Sunday morning. Intruding mechanical sounds are a fact of most of modern life in many places. There are times it is definitely annoying, but I have come to realize there are also mechanical sounds out there that I welcome. When the front door or windows are open on nice, warm days, the sound of a scooter, like a Vespa going by, is filled with nostalgia for me. Having grown up in Europe, in Belgium, scooters were everywhere. Our nanny rode one to come to our house, kids rode them to high school, people every where rode them to, in, and from town, to work, to friends' houses, on dates. They were everywhere.When I hear their sound, I am immediately transported to another space and time, often happy memories, of scooters whirring by on a nice walk at the seaside. Scooters were in abundance at the seaside, as a cheap form of transportation for teenagers on summer break. I never had one, but several of the girls in my high school in Roeselare, my hometown, rode them to high school, in fun colors, like baby blue and tangerine. Scooters were full of promise to me, of fun, freedom, they were symbols of free time, romance,summer dreams. Whenever I see one now, I still am filled with youthful longing, and I can smile happily recalling how my husband Michael and I went everywhere on his Yamaha Virago motorcycle when we were dating in graduate school in Austin, Texas. So, even though I did not ride my own motorcycle or scooter, riding on the back of Michael's Virago at neck breaking speeds on the freeway, was good enough revenge for me. Some mechanical sounds also bring twinges of pain, for reasons perhaps misunderstood, or not understood at all. Sometimes, the sound ,simple as it may seem, of a car driving by, hurts, when I feel very vulnerable or sad. Perhaps the fact that emotional pain is something stationary, that is going nowhere until it heals, makes a moving vehicle, like a car, that seems to be going without hesitation from point A to point B, seem like salt on an open wound. Another sound, one that is not particular to spring , but to autumn, is the sound of a jet flying over. In spring time, the sound of a jet, or small airplane going over, is delightful. But something happens when those same airplanes and jets fly over our house and yard in the fall. The sounds by then are muffled in the quiet of drying and falling leaves, that give that all too familiar scent of dying earth, and so the powerful sounds of the jets mingle with the decaying earth, and a deep feeling of time gone by overwhelms us. A jet in summer holds all the euphoria of summer's abundance and seemingly endless hold on time, as nature all around us puts its glory on display. Nothing could be more ordinary than a lawnmower, but who can resist the feeling of hope their sound gives us each spring, as we realize we got through another winter, and life is giving us one more summer to enjoy? Mechanical noises, from small, like the ping of a cell phone message, and the ring of our land line phone, to the spluttering of the coffee machine, the droning noise of the washer, dryer, and our ever present computers, they all are a reminder, in the end, that, for better or worse, we are here, connected, on good days and bad, by a common desire to make sense out of this experience called life.