There must be a doozy of a temperature inversion today, because sounds are carrying forever. Rascal and I were walking in the south end of the Sugarbush woods when we started hearing the train this morning. It must be crossing Traver, I thought at first, enjoying the engineer’s whistle. Now it seems possible the sound may have reached us from somewhere farther away.
As the train got closer to us, we could hear not just the whistle but the clickety-clack of the wheels on the track. You can’t usually hear that from so far away. Even more intriguing, we heard the engineer whistle several more times as we walked along, and we could still hear the clickety-clack noise twenty minutes later as we climbed our steps at home. Hearing the sound from that far and for that long was quite the treat.
The birds seem to be enjoying the temperature inversion as well. For the last few weeks, the bluejays have been the ones filling the air with come-hither sounds. They’ve since settled down some, and the cardinals have taken over, their fluty tones taking precedence over the jay’s reedy voices. Other are singing away and bustling around, too, but the ones making the loudest noises are the flickers, piercing the air with their long, rattling calls and drumming on the trees. Flickers are such showmen.
Folks remembered the literary voices of Kathryn Jackson and her husband Byron Jackson at the Thrift Shop yesterday. The Jacksons wrote the Little Golden Book, The Saggy Baggy Elephant. A customer purchased it, along with a number of other Little Golden Books, saying she likes to give old story books to new and expectant parents. The Saggy Baggy Elephant was published in 1947, and still delights children. And those who used to be children.
My sweetheart and I went to a production of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town this week. It was staged—to the extent you can say the play is ever staged—by the St. Andrew’s Players, which is to say, adults and young people from our church. Wilder specifies no curtain, no scenery, and complete darkness as the play begins, and adds a minimum of scenery and some light as the play progresses.
As far as I can recall, I’d never seen a presentation of this play before now, so it surprised me as the play progressed, that I had such a strong mental image of how it should look. Aren’t there supposed to be ladders, I wondered, just before the ladders arrived and were unfolded. Part of the dialog in Act One is delivered by actors standing on ladders including, for a while, two actors on the same ladder.
When we read this play in high school, I don’t remember any of us being concerned for the safety of the actors. The audience at church were concerned. You could hear their sotto voce murmurs as the actors took their places. The ladders were tall and in the dimmed light of the church, the young people standing on them looked as if they were floating in space, in a world of their own.
It’s while the character George Gibbs is on a ladder that his sister character Rebecca climbs up with him and speaks my favorite lines of the play. She tells her brother about a letter received by one Jane Crofut during a time of illness. Her minister sent it to her, “and on the envelope the address was like this: Jane Crofut; The Crofut Farm; Grover’s Corners; Sutton County; New Hampshire; United States of America.”
“What’s funny about that?” her brother asks.
Deciding on a place to go for dinner last night required considerable discussion. Where could we go that weren’t too noisy? The options are many during the summer, when restaurants open their outside seating areas. In the winter, not so much.
The last time we dined out, we went to the Corner Brewery. We enjoy the food there, but conversation was out of the question. The place seems to be patronized almost exclusively by people who like to shout, and all the surfaces are hard. The sound just reverberates.
Yesterday, we decided on the Sidetrack. We like the food there, too, although the clientele and acoustics are similar to the Corner Brewery. When asked for their quietest table, they informed us that that would be on the back patio and that the heaters were on. It’s still winter here, but we decided to give the outdoor seating a try.
It was peaceful out there. We could hear each other’s voices. And even after all these years, that’s something we enjoy.
27 February 2026