Editor's Note

Brian K. Mahoney.

Spring draws us outside. To our gardens and our lawns. To our other lives, the kind not lived shuttling from one heated indoor space to another, the world we just coldly pass through. As the season progresses, late spring draws us outside at night. Under the stars we exist again out of doors like children set loose on the playground after a too-long day of tests, assemblies, and teachings. We set up our backyards, our decks, and our porches to maximize evening utility, for dinner and conversation, for long stares off into darkness on balmy nights.

Inspired by a recent article in this very magazine about creating outdoor rooms (“Take It Outside” by Laurie Capps, 5/07), Lee Anne and I recently purchased a pair of Adirondack chairs and a yellow bush daisy, a flowering five-foot tall shrub we planted in half a whiskey barrel and named Susan. We positioned the ensemble in a corner of our back deck in early May, admired the arrangement for a few minutes as being just so, and retreated inside, as the afternoon was chilly verging on cold.

In late May I finally had the opportunity to enjoy our backyard setting in the full flower of night, spending a couple hours just sitting and listening to the night.

Two years ago in July, I wrote what I termed “a transcription of the aural landscape of my backyard” in this space, describing the variety of noises I heard one early June morning. This month, I have endeavored to capture the evening sounds of that same space. Some similarities occurred. For instance: As my house is just three blocks from Rt. 9W as it rips through the southeast section of Kingston, four lanes wide, what I mostly heard were the sounds of machines equipped with internal combustion engines. Morning, noon, and night, these noisy beasts create the background traffic surf that all other noises foreground against or die without overpowering. Other human sounds dominate the aural life of cities as well—voices, domesticated animals communicating to their owners or each other, the sounds of technology: radio, television, You Tube.

Comparing my evening list to my morning list revealed more contrasts than sonic synergies. Morning is generally louder, the night—not surprisingly—subdued. There was an absence of birdsong, so forthrightly cacophonous from dawn on in every neighborhood tree. I also noted the pleasant absence of the pealing bells from the three churches hard by my block, which as I wrote before, strike the hour slightly out of sync, “like a lunatic carillonneur.” And not only that, the bells toll on beyond reason: one o’clock, four o’clock, nine o’clock, 20 o’clock. Twenty o’clock? Does St. Dymphna’s operate on military time? Mass at 08000 hours? How we managed to triangulate ourselves between them when we bought the house is no doubt a sacred conundrum.