AMERICA'S SUMMER SOUNDS MAY REACH MARS

Summertime sounds are approaching the apex of crescendo. Young persons ride with their car windows down so others can hear the music with which they are so enamored. I can hear the low insistent beat of the drums from a quarter mile away. By the time the car passes my house, all the birds, dog, crickets and other droning insects are dazed into silence. Then a cricket somewhere around the old cistern will start up again, tentatively, as if on alert for another bewilderment.

Young robins trailing along close to their mothers cheepingly announce that they need food. Blue jays quarrel stridently at some quiet creature. Maybe they have spied the stalking cat or the mute garter snake. Last time I saw this back yard inhabitant he was disappearing into a crack between the porch steps and the porch foundation. I whopped his tail but it wiggled vigorously before disappearing altogether as if to show me he was still in control. I wonder where he finds room for himself in that little crevice.

I think, when purple martin babies emerge from their elevated homes to see what the world looks like, that the parents fly off to get kin folk from other martin families to come see what they have done. Martin authorities say the birds lay from four to six eggs. If there are six eggs and they all hatch, three pairs of martins can result in eighteen new chattering, chortling voices to add to the summer sounds. But when, as I suggest, the parents go off to bring company who good manneredly exclaim and rejoice over what has come about, why, even the passing loud-music motorists are nothing more than the sound of some hornet boring into a piece of soft wood.

The mighty mowers of grass raise the sound decibel. Almost anytime of a summer day one can hear a lawnmower chewing up grass somewhere. If nearby, they overcome the good-business roar of the outside unit of the air conditioners.

The screams and laughter of children at play add, pleasantly, to the summer sounds and I wish it could be heard all over the world in Ethiopia, Bangladesh, Romania, etc.

Other intermittent sounds sirens indicating help is on the way or bad persons are about to be caught, air traffic carrying people to and fro give one the comfortable feeling that all is being done on time and in good order.

When the firecrackers, bold exclamation marks of sound, stop, then we'll hear the wind-up-and-run-down of the cicadas. Maybe the sound of an early Katydid will reverberate on the night air.

Put these sounds altogether and you get one big note of America's outside summer in a city just the right size.

If you weary of these outside sounds, just come inside, close the door quietly, fix a glass of tea, find a comfortable chair and relax in a whole new world of eiderdown softness. The tinkling of the ice in your glass is a note on some fairy music scale, speaking of cool refreshment akin to oases in deserts. The hum of a distant fan in the basement or from some ceiling lulls one into languorous loosening of the taut mind. In the silence you may hear a clock ticking or the faint rustle of a sparrow in the gutter, both conductive to nodding off to sleep. If you're lucky you'll dream of a world where all children, well-fed, are laughing and playing, all birds' eggs hatch, all motors start easily and run smoothly, all music is mellow, all crickets find mates, etc.

If you're awakened by a sonic boom, that's all right too. It's part of all America's sounds put together into one big note which, who knows, may, in the summertime, reach Mars. And we'll get an indication "they" heard.

REJOICE!