I’m having morning coffee with my Company Girls friends today. Thanks for hosting, Rachel!

One thing I like best about our neighborhood, besides the great bicycling roads and even better neighbors, is the way it sounds.

Quiet.

Without the racket of traffic and industry, you can hear life going on. Any time we step outside we might hear…

Children playing, shrieking as they jump into swimming pools, calling dogs.

The neighbor’s dog and our little canine, woofing it up through the fence as they run back and forth.

Goats. Goats always sound cranky, a bunch of baritones and tenors interrupting and trying to upstage each other. Somebody nearby has sheep now. Sheep sound sort of like goats but more dignified.

An occasional horse.

Rarely, a donkey. (Even more rare, delightfully rare, is the sound of a police or fire siren passing along the farm road.)

Cows are pretty quiet but sometimes several of them moo in the evening. It might be feeding or milking time.

At night, sometimes, a coyote — or a whole mess of coyotes.

A small regional airport lies about three miles from us. I enjoy hearing little single-engine planes taking off or landing. Some of the planes that drag advertising banners use that airport. Once or twice a year, we are treated to a stunt airshow — at least, the parts of the show that are visible above the treetops from three miles away. One time an Osprey orbited around for two hours. I got NOTHING done that morning.

For me, one of the more compelling sounds is the Chinook military tandem-rotor helicopters that touch down at the airport from time to time. The dense, slow “thub-thub-thub” of a Chinook on approach sends me outside to look every time. I mean, those things block the sun.

Regular, commercial-type helicopters fly in and out from “our” airport, too. Somebody must give helicopter flying lessons there, as we often hear them doing “touch-and-go” takeoffs and landings. They don’t have as appealing a sound as, say, the playing children, but they don’t bother us at all.

Well…. except for night-flying lessons. Once in a while, around 11:30 at night (just as we are nodding off to sleep), a helicopter takes off and starts doing “touch-and-go” exercises. This may go on for half an hour or more, the engine sounding really loud in the quiet of the night. It never gets very far away. In fact, the pilot does a sort of square flight pattern that comes pretty close to our neighborhood before turning a corner and heading back toward the airport.

Yes, that’s one nuisance big enough to lose sleep over. Occasionally. But as near as I can figure, it’s easier to put up with night helicopter lessons than have to listen to car wrecks, gunshots, ambulances, police sirens….

Does your neighborhood have a sound of its own?

Thanks for reading,
Jan