Night Noise

With the recent beautiful weather I’ve opened all the windows to air out the house. After a long, cold winter that is most welcome. And after a couple days of having the windows open I realize something — one of the reasons winter seems so isolating is because I don’t hear the sounds of my neighborhood in winter.

I’m lucky in that I live in an in-town neighborhood and know a lot of my neighbors — and like them. With the windows open I hear them coming and going, talking to one another, sweeping their sidewalks and tinkering on their cars. It is a warm, familiar sound that I cherish. I hear the sounds of kids on skateboards or bouncing basketballs in a neighbor’s driveway. Even when I don’t know what it is they are saying I feel connected. I feel a part of their lives.

But it is the noises at night that I most love — the sounds that go unnoticed during the day.

Last night I was cleaning up the kitchen when I noticed for the first time in a very long time the sound of the Boston-Rockport train as it pulled out of the Gloucester station just a few blocks up the hill. I love the sounds of trains in the night. Last summer when my sister Lisa was visiting she commented on how much she loved hearing the train at night, too. Where she lives in northern Pennsylvania she can’t hear one.

When I was a kid there was a train that came through our town every night a little after 2 in the morning. For years I woke up a few minutes before that train arrived and lay in bed listening to it. There was the clang-clang-clang of bells and clatter of wheels on the tracks and sometimes there was a whistle or just the chugging of forward motion. I loved it. I used to lie in bed and imagine I was a passenger on a train wearing a hat and going somewhere wonderful. My grandmother sometimes took me on the train up to Erie to visit my godparents. It was wonderful.

So last night when I heard the train I remembered all those things and I was glad there are still trains to grace the night with their sounds. The Boston-Rockport passes through Gloucester at about quarter past the hour, every hour from 7 in the evening to 1 in the morning. It is busier during the day but I rarely hear it then. So I will have to remember to be quiet at quarter past the hour and listen for that evocative sound.

I woke around 4 in the morning and could hear the foghorn out off of Eastern Point Lighthouse. That is another of those wonderful, imagination-triggering sounds. Mark calls that foghorn the “groaner”. That’s a good name for it.

Sometimes I hear the low horn of a boat coming into the harbor and all the clinking and clanking of the machinery on board swaying in the waves and wind. Around 4:30 I hear the sound of a car and then the dull “thunk” when the Boston Globe is delivered.

So window-open weather is here and all those beloved and familiar sounds are there. And once again I feel a part of my neighborhood.

Thanks for reading.