Sounds of the Season
By Foy Valentine, Founding Editor
The sounds of Christmas started early this year.
Bent on evoking the warm fuzzies of the Christmas season, advertisers have sought to ensnare us with snatches of "White Christmas," "Rudolph," "Sleigh Bells," "Joy to the World," and "Silent Night" and then lead us, like lambs to the slaughter, to buy their pricey baubles. This clever ploy, however, has led me not to succumb to their blandishements but to conjure up a flood of happy recollections of the sounds of the season.
I have been remembering the crackling and gently hissing sounds of the burning Yule logs, the fine kitchen sounds of my Mother`s busy activity in preparing the feasts of the holiday season, the lowing of the cattle coming in from the pasture for the night and the barn`s welcome protection from the whistling "Blue Northers," the chunking sound of a wheelbarrow full of firewood being piled on the porch to keep the fire going through the long winter nights, the welcome noisiness of visiting kinfolks and exuberant children and good neighbors dropping by to share a mess of fresh pork ribs or a jar of homemade preserves or just to sit a spell and rock and visit, and, of course, the old Christmas songs sung together in church, the same year after year in a truly authentic liturgy. Memories of these sounds of the season are special. Very special.
Move with me now to a more generic consideration of sounds.
I was actually launched into this line of thought by one of nature`s most wonderful symphonies.
A big V-shaped flock of Canadian geese had just flown over our house, honking with such unfettered abandon as to wake the dead. Why such noisy chattering I do not know. I wish I did. Nature does not customarily waste such a precious commodity as the breath of life, so there was to be a reason for this glorious conversation of these marvelous birds. Maybe it is just because they are gregarious and crave conversation. Flying at speeds of up to sixty miles per hour at altitudes of up to three thousand feet, these great snow white geese can travel several hundred miles a day, honking all the way. Their migration over the house where I now live, has reminded me of a hundred such soundings, by night and by day, remembered from my childhood where we lived directly under a major flyway of migratory fowl. What a splendid déjà vu. Lovely, indeed.
A grocery store serendipity a few days ago turned my motor over in a most delightful way. A one-year old seductress absolutely captivated me with her remarkably humanoid verbalizations. The encounter was on this wise. Her mother had stopped the big grocery cart in which this happy little person was ensconced. She had rather short reddish hair and unbelievably bright blue eyes. Her mother was occupied with putting away her credit cards and rumbling around in her purse for her keys. I stooped down to look directly into this little girl`s eyes and then spoke sincerely and pleasantly to her. She smiled broadly baring two glistening front teeth extremely well lubricated with her very own saliva and broke into an astounding utterance of pre-speech, one of the most amazing phenomena of human development. Speech as such had not yet come to this little person, but it was obviously not far away. Hers was a first draft of words just about to form and erupt. After this pleasant outburst succeeded almost immediately by yet another ecstatic communication with a passing grandfatherly type of old man, she clammed up and again smiled sweetly as her mother wheeled her away to their car. She is gone but the melody of her speech lingers on, a lovely sound if ever I heard one.
One of the most memorable sounds of my entire lifetime came to me not long ago in the high mountains of the Sangre de Christo range in northern New Mexico. Our Number One daughter had insisted on taking me as her guest for a jeep-enabled jouncing high country safari. In due time we drove quietly up on a great herd of cow elks, grazing with their nursing young calves close beside them, an elk nursery we later came to understand. When the herd, at least a hundred of them we reckoned, became suspicious of us, they started moving away, quite slowly at first; but then they broke into a trot and then into a dead run. Coming to a formidable barbed wire fence, the cows jumped it with unseemly grace, hardly slowing down.
The calves, however, had to stop and crawl under the fence or between the wires, in the process becoming separated from their mothers. The cows, gregarious by nature, reconnoitered behind the first nearby knoll which was covered by a dense growth of fir and young blue spruce trees, well hidden from us. As we waited to watch the last few straggling calves negotiate their passage through the fence, we began to hear the cows calling.
Now a bull elk bugles or trumpets with a decidedly masculine tone; but elk cows have a much more lady-like voice, not unlike the guttural whimper of a hungry puppy. Imagine a hundred elk cows gently calling, each with her own distinctive small female bugle voice which her own calf could recognize. We listened in profound wonder. It was a symphony of such wild and natural beauty as human ears could ever hope to hear. Finally the last stray calf was united with its mother and the symphony ended. It was a once-in-a-lifetime audience that can only be remembered as truly blessed.
Then there are the recollected sounds of huge bullfrogs croaking their wonderful love songs and perhaps declaring their territoriality from the banks of the nearby tank when I was growing up; the whippoorwill`s beautifully unique "chip-flew-out-of-the-white-oak" call on an early summer evening as the night was settling in; the hoot owl`s gentle invitation to camaraderie extended to one of his own kind from the upper limbs of a great old post oak near my upstairs bedroom windows in the still of the night; and the Bob White`s crisp, bold call to another of his species responding from some unseen fence post some distance away.
Join me, then, in celebrating sounds in general and the blessed sounds of the Christmas season in particular. Sound is the gift of God; and hearing has to be one of God`s most marvelous contributions to our human happiness and well being. Among all our Christmas gifts this season, I hope we can join in breathing a prayer of thanksgiving for all the sounds that signal God`s great grace.
Merry Christmas.
