Music to my ears
On Monday morning, I woke to the mournful call of loons. Looking out the window, I saw a pair of loons through the light mist blanketing the lake. This call has been referred to as a wail - a haunting, echoing sound between mates. I was reminded of lakeside camping holidays with my family in the New England States and Québec. I remember the call being mainly at dusk, a gentle reminder that the day was almost over.
Stepping out onto the deck for a closer look, I was immediately greeted — or warned — by a blue jay in a nearby tree. At first, I mistook its sharp cry for a hawk. Later, I learned that blue jays often mimic hawk calls. Soon several more joined in, their chatter filling the morning air. I couldn’t tell whether they were asking for nuts or telling me to move along. We have Steller’s jays on our island, but never in such numbers and their call is not quite as intimidating.
We are wrapping up another week of our Québec holiday, this time in the Eastern Townships. Whether I am listening to birds greeting the day, the lilt of Québecois voices, or the crackling of dry leaves underfoot, each sound is music to my ears. These are the sounds of my childhood - growing up in the Montréal suburbs and summers spent at my best friend’s cabin in upper state New York.
Over the years, many of my blog posts have featured sound and its absence. I have written about the sounds of travel - the muezzin’s call to prayer well before daybreak in Marrakesh, the piercing call of peacocks strutting on the grounds of an ancestral palace in Oestgeest, the Netherlands, and cowbells clanging softly in the Asturian mountains of Spain.
I have described the sounds of silence - the stillness of pandemic days, and my mother’s punishment through silence, that strained silence “where fear and anger fill the air and made life unbearable”. Also the silence of a Hawaiian volcano where “the measurement of decibels actually goes into the minus point, but there still is a sense of presence, of where you are.”
I have confessed my allure of eavesdropping - not knowing the whole story and crafting my own version of interactions I am witnessing. And I expect I have bored you with stories of the sounds of my island home - the chorus of frogs by the pond, the lone bugling elk that lives with the cows on the farm across the road, and the rustle of pebbles conversing with the sea. In celebrating 100 blog posts several years ago, I even shared some of my favourite sounds - the sound of wind approaching through rustling trees, my dog’s deep sighs of contentment, and ‘un bel di’, an aria from Madame Butterfly.
Hearing, I think, is my most precious of the five senses. Yet, along with the severe arthritis in my knees, I now live with moderate hearing loss in both my ears - age-related and irreversible. I chose not to get hearing aids when I received the news eighteen months ago. I told my husband that I knew this would be frustrating for him. I shared with him that when I could no longer hear the laughter and chatter of grandchildren it would be time. Lately, I find I am asking my 3-year-old granddaughter to repeat herself more often. It is time. When I return home from this trip I will begin to explore hearing aid options.
And finally, late yesterday afternoon I experienced something that I have waited many years to hear. We drove to the Abbaye de Saint-Benoît-du-Lac for vespers, a half-an-hour of Gregorian chants.
I was first introduced to these chants by poet Claudia Lapp, my instructor at John Abbott College. In a course on journaling, she encouraged us to try activities that might open us creatively. Gregorian chant was one of them. These unaccompanied sacred songs have soothed me ever since. I listen when the world feels too much. I listen when I write. And yesterday, I sat in a quiet abbey and listened as the monks’ voices rose and fell in ancient harmony.
Click on the underlined links to be directed to other blog posts I have written on sounds.
