RIVER CITY JOURNAL: LISTEN -- THAT'S THE SOUND OF YOUR CHILDHOOD

Sometimes you are walking down a street and hear a familiar sound. Suddenly your are transported over miles and years.

Some sounds and smells that are stored in our memory banks remain vivid over the years. Certain food smells, for example, can convey you in an instant to a distant time in your youth.

While a particular sound can trigger strong emotions, the noise can come from lots of sources. To hear these memory sounds doesn't always mean you are near whatever made the sound in the first place.

Here's an example:

There are lots of ways to make the sound of a door being slammed. You can hit a board on a table and come close. Or you can drop a wood chest on a tile floor.

One sound that seems to recur in my mind again and again is the sound of the screen door on the back porch of the farmhouse where I grew up.

Like all the houses on Kelo Valley and elsewhere in those days, every house had at least a front door and a back door. Older houses had many more outside doors, generally one from every room in the house because of the fire hazards called wood-burning stoves.

Indeed, the old farmhouse had five outside doors in my earliest memories, which date back to kerosene lamps. Years later the house was electrified and remodeled, and two of those doors were closed off permanently.

Every outside door had a screen door. Without air conditioning, screen doors were what kept out the flies and bogeyman most of the year.

But it is the sound of the screen door on the back porch that lingers in my mind. It had a particular sound, perhaps because of the tension on the spring that pulled it shut, or because of the way the wood frame of the door met the wood frame of the porch doorway.

This screen door was the most used door in the house. The front door was used only if you were dressed for church or school or going to town on Saturday. The rest of the time, the back door was the THE door.

Dressed for chores? Out the back door.

The garden was only steps from the back door.

The cistern (and later the deep-drilled well) were out the back door.

The cellar was out the back door.

The orchard was out the back door.

The tool shed was out the back door.

The wood shed was out the back door.

The privy was out the back door.

The shower was out the back door. (Remind me to tell you sometime about this bathing apparatus, which relied on sunshine to heat water in an old washtub.)

The fields and the woods were out the back door.

The ever-present nest of angry red wasps was just outside the back door. This meant that at certain times of the year you had to be prepared to run or be stung every time you went outside.

In short, most of life outside the house was accessed by the back door.

On the other hand, breakfast, dinner and supper were IN the back door.

When the back screen door was opened, the spring made a certain creaking sound. By listening, you knew exactly how open the door was, either a little or a lot.

And when you let loose of the screen door, it whapped against its frame in a particular way that sounded both wooden and metallic.

That's the sound that I hear repeated all these years later. And whenever I hear it, I immediately look up. Just checking for wasps.

There are probably some high-falutin' scientific ways to describe how sounds lodged in our memories can be so real when they are duplicated. But I rather like to think of the way these sounds transport me back to childhood as my own private time machine.

Not all sound memories are pleasant, of course. Whenever I hear the what sounds like a hoe making contact with rocky loam soil, I cringe. Or when I hear liquid sounds that approximate milk squirting into a pail, I agonize.

But the sound of wind in a pine tree or whippoorwills at dusk immediately transport me to a farm in the hills.

And the screen door sounds like home: chores on the outside, bountiful home-grown meals on the inside.

It's too bad you can't bottle these memory sounds. I'd buy them by the case.

SPARROW UPDATE: Mama Sparrow laid five eggs in the nest in the front-door wreath. Papa Sparrow has been hanging around as well. One of the eggs splattered on the threshold -- perhaps the victim of a robbing blue jay.

~R. Joe Sullivan is the editor of the Southeast Missourian.