C is for Cacophony

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