Spring is Sprung

 

            Spring is Sprung 

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The wolf-whistle bird is back. This sharp-voiced bird returns every spring. It has two very distinctive calls. When I hear its voice, I instinctively jerk my head around to see who is either trying to get my attention (Hey you, over here!) or is teasing me with admiration (Wolf-whistle, I kid you not.).

Then I laugh at myself. Foiled again!

The wolf-whistle bird doesn’t sound anything like a love bird, does it? This avian character sounds more like the kind of birds your mama warned you about, the birds standing on the corner outside the pool hall, ciggies dangling from their lips, jeans hanging dangerously on hips, greasy hair slicked back in perfect duck’s tails.

The ones who populated our fantasies.

Ah, love is in the air.

Our little gringo community consists of a small cluster of homes, only eight or nine. Next door to us on the rancho, is a campground. For me to walk to the campground, if there were a direct path, I would trek through the yard of only one other casa.

Last Saturday night, at the campground, the owner-family hosted a huge wedding reception party celebration of the marriage of the baby of the family, the youngest son, respectably in his fifties. Perhaps it was the bride’s first marriage. I know nothing about his chosen one. Who would not love a wedding?

When I lived in Mazatlan, I saw some fancy wedding parties on the beach, but not one came close to the elaborate preparations, the all-out-gung-ho-no-holds-barred-blitz-and-bling of this wedding, with not a beach in sight.

I was not a guest so I speak from descriptions, photos, and reports of peepers.

When it comes to knowing how to truly celebrate any occasion, Mexicans do it better. Take my word for it. My word, with admiration.

Louder, too.

When the bands began to play, I closed my house and went to bed with my Kindle. It’s not warm and romantic but it is entertaining. Remember when I told you how close my home is to the campground? This is why.

A good celebration requires a bank, a virtual wall of speakers. The most important speakers seem to be the ones which blast out the deep tones. I’m not sure the others matter. Or even register on the ear-consciousness.

What I rather quickly became aware of, is that each boom of the bass hit me on a cellular level. After an hour or so of feeling battered, I physically hurt. My muscles hurt. I did not have a headache. My entire body throbbed. Not like that—with pain.

Sunday morning, I told my friends that I felt like I’d been attacked and beaten up. John told me about an experiment, done years ago, with sound levels, confirming that how I felt was not my over-active imagination.

Sound can and does affect our bodies in more ways than simply losing the upper ranges of tones with age, forcing us to become adequate lip-readers.

I listened closely, watching his lips, as John recalled details (in a nutshell) of an article about an experiment using submarine, or was it subsonic, or is that a football team (?), wolfers. John is a careful researcher and has a memory like a steel trap. He said these sub-wolfers are the ones that carry the bass tones.

John said that at a concert event, the researchers, using huge speakers, cranked the wolfs up to 80 mega hurts. This particular level of sound, heard or unheard, caused a mass evacuation of audience to the restroom facilities.

Oh, my, I said. That explains a lot.

I don’t know about you, but loud boom-boom-boom noise does not put me in the mood for romance. If there is ever another wedding or party in the campground, I’m renting a hotel room for the night, three towns distant.

I hope the newly wedded couple live many years in bliss.

Me, I’ll stick with the wolf-whistle birds, reminding me of old times, past fantasies.

Sondra Ashton

HDN: Looking out my back door

Middle of March already!

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Today I Received a Love Letter

Today I Received a Love Letter
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Sunday, the first day of January. Today I received a love letter. It didn’t arrive in the conventional manner, tucked in my box at the post office, enclosed in an envelope with my name in the center and a cancelled stamp in the upper right-hand corner. It fell out of a book I was reading, a used book, “Garbo Laughs”, a novel by Elizabeth Hay, a writer from Ottawa, Canada. Who knows how long it had held a place between the pages.

I turned the page and a small piece of paper fell onto my lap. I instantly recognized it was special. I picked it up. “A love letter,” I said. My insides went warm and fuzzy and my face relaxed into a smile. A love letter meant for me. I wondered who sent it.

What conniving of the gods routed this special missive from a previous reader into my hands.

What other book lover knew that I would find “Garbo Laughs” entrancing, sweet and romantic. How did he know this copy would travel its circuitous route to me. Did he suspect that I might move the book from pile to pile for several weeks before I picked it up, opened it and settled into my chair to read. Did he know it would be days before I would reach the particular page, before the slip of paper would fall into my lap to delight me.

The paper is plain, ripped from a three by five spiral-bound notebook and measured by aqua blue lines. The spirals bind the top of the pages which then flip open from bottom to top. The page is unusual. Centered below the ragged spiral shreds and the first blue line is a hole. The page is from the kind of notebook that my father carried in the left pocket of his chambray shirt along with a stub of pencil. Several of these notebooks, tattered and smudged, hung from nails in Dad’s machine shop out at the farm where I grew up. Do notebook makers still make this old fashioned notebook, with the center-punched hole designed for hanging from a nail?

I have an embarrassingly large collection of notebooks, every style and size. They are everywhere, in every room, on shelves, a stack on my desk, in my purse, in my van. I make sure paper is at hand if I want to write down a thought, an idea, a task, a poem. Yet none of my notebooks are like the old-fashioned one from which my lover ripped this page so that this morning I could receive his tender thoughts.

There are no words on the paper. The page is blank. So how do I know it is a love letter? I know in the same intuitive way we know when the phone is about to ring. The way we know one of our children a thousand miles away is having a bad day. The way we know rain is over the horizon although the sky above is cloudless blue. This scrap of paper is a love letter. I know.

Does anybody write love letters these days? I doubt it. We should. An expression of love doesn’t come across the same way in an email or text message. No, a love letter, to convey the proper emotion, must be handwritten. It requires the movement of one’s hand holding the pen to translate thoughts and feelings from one’s heart onto paper. With a handwritten letter, the reader can tell from the slant, from the speed of writing, from the clarity of the letters what mood the writer was in; whether happy or angry or sad or exuberant. Even a scrawled note can be beautiful, a paper to treasure, to bind up in ribbon with other such letters, to be saved in a shoe box and hidden beneath the shawls on the top shelf of the closet.

Today, the first day of January, 2012, the day of my love letter, I walk with my head in the clouds. I put the milk carton in the bathroom medicine chest and my hair brush in the refrigerator. My socks don’t match. I burn the soup. I hum sappy tunes from old musicals. I’m in love with my unseen lover.

Somebody out there loves me. Somebody sent me words of love, unwritten, on a blank page, but easily read nonetheless. I love romance.

Sondra Ashton
HDN: Looking out my back door
January 5, 2012
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