Susurrus. Terry Pratchett first called my attention to the word. I’d certainly known the term before, but Terry Pratchett first really called it out. It’s swirly, swishing onomatopoeia, the interior beauty of the word. It’s a sound I don’t get enough of. I get plenty of white noise, which it is similar to. But crowd noise is not susurrus. Fan noise isn’t either. 60 cycle hums are… well… hums. Static is static and doesn’t have skirling nature that a susurrus has. It’s a strictly organic sound, only approached sidelong by an over-taxed and overamped flanger working the high end of a speaker in distant waves. You know, with the feedback levels tuned JUST below where you can hear the sine?
Dropping off the rent. Our landlord Lives just down the way and though I don’t enjoy the way I drop off a bunch of my hard-earned money once a month, I DO like the way he comes and takes care of the lawn and the water heater and whatever went wrong in the upstairs bathroom a couple of months ago. It’s 94 degrees and it’s supposed to crack 100 today and I dread stepping out of the air conditioning of the car, but as I do, I find the breeze. It’s all at my landlord’s house, and beyond that – it’s swirling and rustling – giving us quite a susurrus in the oak trees surrounding his lawn. I flash back to my parents’ house – and the huge trees in our backyard while I was growing up – my father built a tree house into them, we hung a hammock between two of them, and I remember drowsing and daydreaming in the shifting sunlight on lazy days beneath the leafy susurrus, swirling and whispering. It’s a rarity. It’s just comfortable enough in the shade, but too hot to move out of it, the sounds haven’t been drowned out yet by the late-summer UFO drone of cicadas… it’s not late enough in the evening to be fighting mosquitoes but not so early I feel guilty just taking a moment to drink it all in…
I need to steal some 50 year-old oak trees and plant them in the backyard. We wouldn’t have room for ANYTHING else – but that sound would be worth it.
Dave Eisner of the House of Musical Traditions visits himself upon an impromptu transferral of piano knowledge from Sharif to Jocelyn Faro after my open mic at The Board and Brew in College Park, MD. Jocelyn Faro MaryAnn Ryan Cecilia Grace
