Sounds of summer writing

There are no bells or buzzers at college to tell you when classes are changing.  Inside the classroom I can tell when it's nearly time to go by the way students begin to wink out — first one or two, then entire rows vanish — as they transport themselves mentally, if not physically to their next destination.  In my office, which sits at a crossroads along a linking corridor between wings, I can hear the rustle of backpacks and bodies as students flow like sand through the neck of an hourglass from one wing to the other.

Writing in the study under the eaves at home, such hour markers are entirely absent.  I can look up from desk, shocked to find two hours or more have slid undetected through my fingers.  There is a silkiness to time in the summer.  The birds sing endlessly outside, the leaves of the enormous oak outside my window stir sleepily in the breeze, the sounds of the train that run nearby brush by my consciousness.  There is the continuous throaty hum of lawn mowers and leaf blowers, fighting their endless and losing fight against entropy, trying to contain the abundant growth of summer.  And then...

There is the high pitched squealing from the neighbor children's motorized trikes on the driveway across from me.  I find myself scrunching up my shoulder blades in the aural equivalent of a squint, and have to take a deep breath and let their sounds go.  And the car alarm on the next block that goes off for 10 minutes at a stretch that has me routinely fantasizing about printing out the research that shows they are not deterrents to theft and taking a walk until I find the offending car.

As much as I'm momentarily annoyed by the snags in my summer silks, they are good reminders to stand up and stretch. To let the sounds of summer not just dance around the edges, but to soak into my being.  To take my book, my yellow pad or even my laptop out onto the back patio and breathe.  To stop trying to rein in and control the abundance of summer's growth.