We live on a hobby farm. That’s
a farm that doesn’t seriously try to make money or make any attempt to apply
for government farm subsidies. Money goes in but it never comes out. It’s like
owning a boat, but with goats.
The countryside of Central
Florida, where we hobby farm, has its own special sounds and smells. I like to
call it the cacophonous order of freedom. We live outside the city limits,
limits being the optimal word. We live in the county where the rules are different,
options abound, and the sound of gunfire is frequent and non-threatening.
“Why is the dog hiding under
the dinner table?” I ask.
“The neighbors,” a grand boy
replies, “they’re shooting at stuff.”
Everyone tilts their head—some
to the right, some to left—to listen. Sure enough, the sound of blam, blam,
blam drifts through the dining room windows.
“Ahhhh . . . target practice.”
It’s a consensus.
The smell of smoke accents the
sound of gunfire. We all breathe deeply. “Ahhhh . . . Mr. Medina is burning stuff,”
I observe.
Sandhill cranes bang out their
hollow drum call as they sail across the sky. In the cow pasture behind us,
coyotes send up their primal howling. A lone cow, possibly in labor, bawls out
her distress. The air boat guy two properties down, fires up his airboat,
sending a bratty, screechy whine spewing across the neighborhood.
Children yell and shout and yip
from the “talking tree.”
By the by, the talking tree is
not a tree that talks, it is a tree where you go to sit and talk to your
buddies, thus, the talking tree.
Our dog barks at something only
she can see or hear or smell.
The wind sets the leaves to
trembling and skittering in the golden light of a dying sun.
The sounds of sirens and
traffic are intermittent at best and act as a counterpoint to all the rest—the
cacophony of the countryside where we live.
But now that I think of it,
isn’t a cacophony a discordant collection of jarring noises?
Answer: Yes!
So, I’m going to change my
word. It’s not a cacophony at all.
The sound of air rattling past
Maple leaves and rushing through Spanish moss mixed with the perfume of smoke
and colored with the shrieks of laughing kids and the bleating talk-talk
between mother goats and their babies isn’t a cacophony at all.
It’s music.
Linda (All Ears) Zern
