The Feeling of Sound

It is the ocean—geographically impossible—or rain, fat heavy drops, not forecast. Or perhaps the clapping of an audience watching from afar pleased with this particular performance of Dishes Being Washed and Benches Being Wiped.

An Easterly is blowing and I am tetchy. The two may be related but let’s not presume an unscientific cause-and-effect conclusion—I generally need no real reason for tetchiness.

I put down the dishcloth and lean on the sink, head bowed, eyes closed. There is it again—the sound of rain. Sun warms my hands.

Can it be called wind if it blows without making any sound? Is part of wind the fact that it causes things to make noise? If it didn’t do this, would it be called something else?

Solar winds make no noise. The only way we know they are blowing is because the sky at the poles lights up with iridescent green and blue. I haven’t seen it myself. I am trusting what someone at some time must have told me and I believed them. Most likely it was when I was a child before the internet was the way we find things out. A TV documentary perhaps, or National Geographic Magazine, or even a children’s book.

I have never doubted that the solar winds blow. Noiselessly.

Rain would mean I could skip the quotidian watering of the vegetable garden. I am faithful to these edible annuals but all the same, today I’d like to watch them getting wet instead of being the one making them wet.

I want so much for this sound to be rain that I cannot hear anything else. The BOM has supplied undeniable evidence that it is not raining and will not for days. When the rain arrives it does so silently.

Can we call it rain if it makes no noise?

I look up.

Earlier, years earlier, sick of mowing and grass and monocultures, I transformed our front yard into a small piece of native bushland. Grevillea, boronias, and myrtles. Kangaroo Paws, a NSW Waratah, and my treasure, a Grass Tree. And A Suggan Buggan grass for funsies. These all grow in the spaces around the Snow Gum.

Each time the gum tries to grow tall, I prune it heavily and weigh down its remaining branches with river rocks. I am a poor substitute for the snow that shapes and forms these massive trees into twisted beauties. Nonetheless, I do what I can and it is working with some success.

I open the front window; the Easterly blows viciously across the yard.

The Snow Gum is two meters tall now and covered in large thick green leaves filled with eucalyptus oil. They clatter together, releasing the smell of the Australian bush.

I forgot just how much like rain wind in the bush sounds.