Sounds I expect to hear during December.
1. Bells.
2. “Oh Boy! What smells so good in the oven?”
3. Snow Blowers. (I hope not!)
4. Scrape of snow shovels. (I hope so!)
5. Tire chains.
6. Crows cawing as they gather at twilight.
7. Clinking radiators.
8. “Light one candle.”
9. A match striking.
10. An axe splitting fire wood.
11. A crackling fire.
12. Carol singing.
13. “Bah! Humbug!”
14. The squeak of snow under foot.
15. Hockey referee’s whistle (after the strike ends).
16. Champagne corks popping.
17. The same holiday song over and over again, at every grocery store, coffee shop, bank . . .
18. Postal and package delivery trucks stopping on my street.
19. My own footsteps taking me to the window to see if one of those trucks has a present for me!
20. “Attention shoppers!”
21. The lonely winter wail of a train horn passing through Panther Hollow.
22. “Hi Mom, we just landed. Can’t wait to see you!”
23. Wind.
24. The hush after snowfall.
25. “Ho! Ho! Ho!”
26. Candles spitting.
27. Chattering teeth.
28. Campaign robo calls. (Wait — that was November!)
29. Skate blades on ice.
30. Roar of the crowd as the Steelers score!
31. “Happy New Year!”
Someone who really pays attention to sound is the Canadian composer R. Murray Schafer. In The Tuning of the World he writes about the soundscape throughout history, and explores and analyzes our present acoustic environment. A recent New York Times essay led me to a new book, The Universal Sense: How Hearing Shapes the Mind by Seth Horowitz, an auditory neuroscientist who handles very technical aspects of hearing and sound with humor and grace.
~Julie
Eleventh Stack 