A friend wrote of the strangeness of the sounds that keep her awake in her new rural home and I wrote this to remind her of the city she has left.
This morning a sound appeared: the heavy, slicing noise of a police helicopter hovering overhead. The sound grew so big it vibrated from the walls of the courtyard, it filled the house so solidly that I couldn’t determine on which side the machine was, until I spotted it over the children’s playground. The cutting utterance it makes is so loud it is muted and ends in an absorbed thud. When it left the distant police siren was whimpering.
The double glazing is so solid that the rain dances as silent glazed sun drops in the air eddies. The sound of weather is better heard by the passing of cars and the firm hiss of wet road under tires. Airplanes are boring through the atmosphere above the cloud layer; the birds are flying low after their air space was dominated by the huge metal insect.
This is Sunday in the city. As the minutes pass the rain grows heavier and falls into neat lines. Normally I like to travel or simply to walk and feel the sky around me but today would better be spent indoors and cleaning the windows to watch the rain more clearly.
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