No matter how many times I hear the gentle song of mourning doves, the sound transports my mind elsewhere. Poof! I am standing in my late grandparents’ lush, Central Phoenix backyard, my happy place throughout childhood and young adulthood. Mourning doves are calling calmly from the trees across the lawn.
The seconds-long daydream subsides. I calmly keep working in my present landscape, the south slope of my NW Tucson yard, January 2021. Our family has had some figuratively rocky weeks navigating national news and personal health. I cling to the tangible satisfaction of my earthworks project – yep, the same one I referenced back in November. Alternately I focus on anti-erosion strategy and choosing the right-sized rocks for different sections of sand vs. caliche and tenacious shrubs to work around, and let my mind wander on the back-and-forth trips to the rock pile or when muscle memory kicks in for picking up and placing stones.
I pause when a new sound filters into my thoughts: the staccato of crickets chirping. I turn my head toward the sound’s likely location, a corner of shade, acacia, and finished rip-rap. I check in with my memories of the sound and find myself on a bare clay swath of South Dakota badlands, near a dry wash and patches of grass where crickets sing in the early night 20 years ago. The past continues to lap at the present as I resume fitting rocks together in the sand.
It’s time to test a section of rock-covered slope – will it direct water to the saltbush in a basin below? I am surprised to hear my own giggle as I watch the hose water first burst out one way – the wrong way – and then a few more ways before the plant actually gets a drink. The water cheerfully trickles through rip-rap, in some places producing a soft swoosh of sand through the cracks, tiny alluvial fans. “This is fun,” I grin. For a few minutes I daydream myself back to any number of creekside childhood camping trips, in the Sierra Nevadas, the San Juans, Yosemite. Then, as now, I could play with and be soothed by rocks and water for hours.
When I need more rocks at the middle or bottom levels of the downward slope, my preferred method is to toss them just… so… and success is when I hear a crack of rock-hitting-rock but see that nothing actually cracks. This sound, and the more muffled tumble of rocks shifting in the rock pile, may lodge themselves in my brain as a core memory associated with this place, these days. It takes a moment’s effort to associate those same sounds – there they are! Joyful, intentional children scuffling over the pile of river rock in the Miles ELC garden, light in their permission to climb and serious in their selection of sizes to carry and then plunk in the earthworks around the ramada. I move on in my present rolling of rocks while mourning this daydream more than the others. It is unfinished. My students and those rocks are indefinitely separated by a city’s worth of ethernet cables and wi-fi signals. In my mind I tell myself to “go to the rock shop”, a phrase with which I directed another set of students to select the right flagstone pieces from the delivered pile for the patio around the pond. I proceed with my selections of rip-rap at home. My mind wanders to a well-worn track of lesson plans and problem-solving about distance-learning dilemmas.
“Mom?” my son calls from the driveway. I welcome the interruption of my thoughts by this sound. The voice is searching – I am invisible from his position just 50 feet above – and a little sad. Not quite a whine, thank goodness. “I’m down here!” I shout, and he quietly steps among the gravel in his socks. No, he doesn’t want to put shoes on and help. He wants company. He spots the Gambel’s quail busily working on a bird seed block next door. We listen together to the native birds chattering, a friendly, bubbling sound that rises and falls like conversation. The same birds sometimes worry around me when my work disrupts their path. This slope is a wildlife corridor among four suburban properties. I tell the quail they’ll have it back soon.
My son wanders back to the house. I am thankful for sharing the moment of listening to bird song in the present and that my family knows where to find me. I remember that my mom specifically enjoys quail in our Tucson yard because the species was absent from her home on the western end of Mesa for the decades she lived there. I realize that some sounds are signposts of the here and now, while others help me travel back through time. What is the soundtrack in your yard? Do sounds conjure daydreams of the past, present, or future for you? Tune in to where you are, and perhaps comment with where the sounds take you.