This Month's Story

Stella and I don’t listen to music very much here on the farm. I don’t know why. We do enjoy musicals and have an extensive DVD collection of these. Phantom of the Opera, Evita, My Fair Lady, and a score of others are movies we have watched as the snow blew around the farmhouse many, many times.

The movies are great, but it is their music that sends us back to play them again and again. We would sit, watch, and listen, and the snow would disappear and all that would be left around us was wonderful music.

As to CDs, we have none. Nor, come to think of it, do we listen to the radio; in fact, we don’t have a radio except in the car and the truck. I don’t know why this is so.

I do know that in my younger days, music was a big thing. I had tons of records and these were constantly playing all day long in my small apartment. I remember Stella and me going to a party in which we boogied to I Heard It Through The Grapevine.

When the record would end, someone would yell, “Play it again!” and they would, and we would dance some more, or at least until about two o’clock in the morning when the police came. As I said, we were very young.

I can remember other times.

I was once on a survey ship in the Indian Ocean for thirty days. My work required me to work from midnight until four in the morning. I became friends with the ship’s radio operator and the third mate, who had their watches at the same time.

The three of us would gather in the radio operator’s room each day in the late afternoon and listen to music on tapes taken off a radio station near Boston. The three of us would relax on the twin bunks and one chair in the radioman’s compartment and listened to music from a thousand miles away.

I especially liked the part where the station disc jockey would give the weather.

“Heavy snow is expected late today. Freezing conditions will make roads treacherous for the evening commute.”

Then the music would start again and we would stare out the compartment’s one porthole at the occasional heavy wash of warm green water thrown there by the seas whipped up by the winds of the summer monsoon.

Funny, I can’t remember what music we listened to; this was the late sixties, but even then, there was a great variety of music.

Another time, I was skiing in Wyoming, and a friend and I drove to see the snow-covered Grand Tetons on a clear day. We had a tape player and ate our lunch in the truck in the snow, viewing the grand majesty of the Tetons spread before us and listening to the hauntingly beautiful aria, “Un bel dì (One beautiful day)” from Puccini’s opera, Madame Butterfly.

Here on the farm, there is a sort of music, come to think of it. A wonderful range of different types of music being played all around us.

Here, for example, we have a wealth of local and migratory songbirds that vary in their presence as the seasons change, with each bringing different songs.

We didn’t hear land birds around our beach house in Mississippi, and seagulls are not melodious when it comes to singing. So what we hear here is markedly different. Come to think about it, the Mississippi mockingbirds we heard there were rather raucous.

Now, when I hear a mockingbird, its voice is a pleasant sound that fills the air with a sound that causes me to stop and listen, amazed. To hear the same mockingbird at night, while Stella and I sit on the porch or in the pergola, is one of life’s great joys.

There are other sounds, the frogs croaking in the pond, the soft, late night “whoo” of a resident owl that lives in the thick woods near the house, the long call and rumble of a train on the rail tracks a mile to our east, the tick of the clock, and, in between all of these, the soft murmuring quiet of the day.

It is quiet here.

I remember one day I heard Stella talking to someone around the side of the house. I was puzzled. We have so few neighbors, none of them near, and I didn’t hear a car pull up the long driveway.

I stopped what I was doing and walked around to the side of the house to see who she was talking to.

She stood by the post and rail fence and talking rather animatedly to a bird sitting on the top rail.

It wasn’t a one-sided conversation. The bird twittered back once and then waited. Then it twittered once more and flew away, evidently satisfied that what had to be said, had been said. Stella watched it for a moment, then bent down to mess with her flower garden, evidently equally satisfied the conversation was done.

Later, in the deepening light after supper and with us sitting on the porch, we heard a bird singing in a nearby tree.

“Is that your friend?”

Stella listened for a minute. “I think so.”

And so we do listen to a kind of wonderful music played by the broad range of sounds that fill all our days.

Still, there are times when I stop and hear and enjoy in my mind, the long ago romp and dancing I did with Stella to the heavy beat of I Heard It through the Grapevine.