What Sounds Do You Love?

the ocean.
palm fronds rubbing in the wind.
a chorus of birdsong.
my humming family.
a record, just after the music stops.

My grandmother, who loved peach schnapps on ice, used to gently sway her glass and say, “I just love the sound of ice tinkling in a glass.” Every once in a while, I buy some peach schnapps, pour it over ice, and smile as I remember her.

The splash when someone jumps into water.
The kissing-type sounds the hummingbird in my garden makes
Sighing dogs, purring cats
A pen on nice paper
My husband playing guitar
And all of the nature sounds- rain, wind, ocean, thunder, leaves, snow

The sound of purring from my fraidy cat.
Rain falling on the leaves on the trees.
The chick-a- dee’ s call.
The tick of the grandfather clock
The rustle of dry fall leaves as I walk through them

Loud music outside when you can’t really tell where it’s coming from.
Car wheels on a gravel/stone driveway. (from childhood swim club and Jersey shore)

For me, it’s the sound of complete silence. I only recently experienced that for the first time in a long time. We visited Summit Prairie and it was absolutely delightful. https://www.summitprairie.com/

I like other sounds too – champagne corks, rain and thunder, the sound of softly falling snow, a fireplace crackling, my two Maine Coon cats purring, and the joyful laughter of anyone in the room.

Windshield wipers
Baseball on the radio (especially, “Here’s the pitch…!”)
The cheers from a small-town football game from far away
Air brakes
The tiny change in the quality of the silence when it’s snowing at night
The electrifying cry of a newborn baby (It’s awful, but I feel like the visceral “do something” reaction it provokes from nearly everyone is one of those things that make me feel secure in our common humanity)

everyday when I come home my little mutt, Gidget, stands on her hind legs and paws the air until I bend down to her level to pet her hello & she makes the most darling little tiny grunts of barely contained PURE JOY that just makes my heart squeeze.

-when my sweet lab “snarfs” with glee when as he wakes— it’s like a special dog sneeze of excitement? He does it when I come home, too, but it just kills me that he’s so happy every time he wakes up.

-the sound of wind through Aspen trees

-the way my dad clears his throat, ugh, drove me crazy as a kid but makes me smile now (same category as Alex with the movie toes:))

-sound of train arrivals/departures sign clicking over in old stations

-the dryer tumbling

-a loon

My brother is the youngest of five, with all four older siblings being girls! He once told me (as adults) one of his favorite, most comforting sounds to him is the sound of a hair dryer. Being woken up as little boy with all his middle and high school sisters getting ready for school was once a huge annoyance, but turned into a memory and sound that felt like home.

my kiddo’s deep belly laugh. She’s 9 and 1/2 now, but when she really gets going, it sounds just like it did when she was a toddler. I hope it never grows into a different laugh.
other visceral sounds to me are: high heels on a concrete ground makes me look around for my mom, coins jingling in a loose pocket makes me look for my grandpa (both mom and papa have been gone for many, many years so these sound catch me every time). Just recently I’ve grown fond of the sound of something with metal clinking around in the spinning dryer (is it the button on my leans, or something with a zipper?) – it sounds like home and childhood.

Rain on a window when I don’t have to get up; the sea shushing against sand; the pop of a proper cork coming out of a bottle of wine; my espresso pot bubbling; my boyfriend breathing in his sleep; that first guitar thrum heralding the start of any gig I’ve ever been to.

* An orchestra tuning, the auditory tingle of anticipation
* Frogs croaking, the satiety of summer
* Cracking open an egg, a promise of something delicious
* Fluffing my pillow, the warmth of my bed

– The sound of snow under my foot when you step out on a cold morning after snowfall. Everything sounds quieter and it’s as the world stops to take in the white scene.
– the humming sound of the prayer wheels around the stupas in Kathmandu. It’s where I met my husband and those mornings we went exploring the city was magic.
– my kids laughter as they play hide and seek
– the crackle from a fire and Someone opening a bottle of wine
– rain on a tin roof
– bbc world service

This is so good.

A few of my very vivid sound memories and favorites (categorized for clarity because I am a spazz).

Present Life
+ The silence after my in-laws leave town (!)
+ My husband’s voice. Just the right amount of growl to make me shiver.
+ The pitter patter of our toddlers’ legs across the hardwood floor.
+ A coworker saying “I’ll lead this client call, just listen on background.”
+ The washing machine going. THINGS ARE HAPPENING AROUND HERE.
+ The ding of my phone when I get a new text when me and a friend are deep in a good s*** talking sesh and I know I’m going to laugh so hard at whatever she says next.

Past Life
+ Sprawled out on the couch on a fall morning next to an open window while the cellist I was seeing practiced Shostakovitch. The street sounds, the music, the breeze, the total indulgence of that moment.
+ Me and my besties’ heels on a cold sidewalk freezing our butts off on the way out for the night.
+ Dance music (not EDM) at a club where you can actually feel the bass through your bones. Like pressed up against the speaker feeling it…
+ Rush of the wind on the back of a motorcycle

Since the Beginning
+ Dad’s whistling.
+ Mom’s voice.
+ Grandpa saying “Hey kiddo,” grandma saying “You’re my shining star”

My moms laugh
My parents singing “you’re so cute I love you!!!!” into the phone at the end of phone calls (a family joke from the Mari Condo series)
Purr of my godcats
and like many others, the silence of fresh snowfall.

So many lovely sounds…
– my kids’ foosteps climbing up the stairs to my bedroom in the morning
– walking through crunchy snow
– a creek
– crickets on a summer night
– crackling fire, ocean waves, and all those that are on my sleep app, haha
– making a good friend laugh so hard that she snorts ;-)

A hardcover library book as it opens.
Utensils/dishes in movies (yeah, it’s a weird one).
My five-year-old’s pitter-patter when he goes back and forth in his room working on some sort of “project.”
My one-year-old babbling to herself when she wakes up in the morning.
The absolute perfect combo of seagulls + the ocean.
My mother singing a lullaby in Spanish.

The sound of rain — drizzles, thunderstorms, all of it, but especially the rolling thunder that we get here in the tropics. It builds up slowly in volume and then tapers off. It thrills to something deep within.

The sound of church bells. I did my A-levels in a missionary school with one of the country’s oldest Catholic churches — a cathedral, really — right next door and the bells would ring out every day at 1pm sharp. I’ll never forget how much I loved that sound. I’m not nor have I ever been Christian but Ive always been moved by the melodies of hymns, especially when sung by choirs like the Vienna boys choir. The sound of such angelic voices raised together in harmony is spine-tinglingly lovely.

Alanis Morissette’s Jagged Little Pill album will forever remain the soundtrack to my life in 1997, the year of nascent independence and freedom in my heretofore extremely sheltered life as a then-teenager. Every single song on that album is seared in my brain as the anthem of my budding young womanhood, of learning how to navigate the world while figuring out who I was as a person, both together with and independent from the expectations (and limitations) of the roles that had been thrust upon me as a sister, daughter, student, and member of the fairer but weaker sex in a patriarchal society.

Another sound I love is the clackety clack of old school typewriters, especially the “ding!” that rings out when you get to the end of one line and have to manually reset the paper to the next line. I like modern day keyboards too but there’s something more innately satisfying about typewriters — maybe it’s the permanence of the words imprinted in ink on the page, as opposed to the blinking cursor and virtual impermanence of text in a Word document. Easily typed and just as easily deleted with the click of a button.

One other sound that brings back pleasant childhood memories is the rumble of the car engine. As a kid I would go with my parents while they went visiting with relatives and friends on weekends and we’d invariably end up driving home late, with me curled up in the back seat lulled to deep sleep by the hum of the engine and the crunch of the tyres on gravel roads. I remember the intermittent flash of street lights coming through the rear windshield of the moving car hitting my closed eyelids before I nodded off, along with the old school Chinese songs my dad loved playing on the car radio, and the low hum of my parents’ conversation. That was a good three decades ago now but I still recall that feeling of safety and security vividly.