Entry 5: Listening

28 February 2017, evening/dusk
Mid-fifties, overcast, slight breeze

Pittsburgh's overcast sky and fade of cloud-clutched sunlight has given the air a screen of flatness, that quality of dusk where everything is visible but nothing defined. I could stare at the billows and cuts in the clouds above, or get down on my stomach, press my chin to the grass, and watch each individual blade tremble with wind. But today I feel like listening.

I close my eyes. The sound of cars barreling past on Fifth Avenue overwhelms until I let that noise settle out: the swish of tires on asphalt and through unstable air, broken by an occasional clip as a car catches a crack or manhole on the street. I usually think of cars as loud chunks of metal, but they hardly sound metallic at all, more a smooth hum of spinning rubber. Behind me, I pick up the second dominant sound in Mellon Park: the robins. Despite a Sibley's guide to eastern birds sitting in my bedside bookcase back at my apartment, I'm still a foreigner to most of the birds here—but the robins I recognize. They trill and cheep; I think of Mary Oliver and imagine their small pink tongues in their yellow-beaked mouths. Surely they know what they're saying.

To my right, a soft jingle of dog tags, and the joyous screech of children in the playground across Fifth. Sirens flare distantly in Homewood, and then a helicopter joins them from above, rumbling from the southeast to the southwest. Its blades chop the air, echoing a deep-throated whir like someone rolling their R's.

Something scampers in the tree above me, and I catch myself before I can open my eyes to look. It could be a squirrel, or larger bird, but no one in any particular hurry to scurry. It scuttles, pauses, and there's a tentative grind of teeth to acorn. Cracking open my eyes to jot these details down on the page, I noticed minute dabs of rain on my paper, and now I feel them, soft pins of water subtle on my skin.

Tssskkkssskkksskkk. Behind me, two bodies of sharp claws scuffle around the rough bark of a conifer, then bound away through soft mulch. Once in a while, the rubber-lined swish of cars on Fifth breaks into the deep grind of a rising engine. Shift into fourth, I think automatically (or manually?), as the vibration hums into the park's hill and settles against my ankles.

The robins continue their songs, and they sound so much like home. Not home as a place, or a period of time, but just that sound of welcome. I lean in on the differences of their calls—some light and looping in well-versed announcements, others sharp in declarations of charisma. There's an urgency in some chirps, a confrontation voiced by the deep-breasted birds singing their strengths into the gray dusk.

The wind doesn't seem to blow anymore, but rather sighs. Dead leaves and blades of grass shuffle slightly in the breeze, and I can hear the earth clicking, faint but tight ticks present even over the rush of traffic. Earthworms, I imagine, wriggling through humus and sharp grains of minerals. Or perhaps the earth always clicks and shifts, and I'm just too visually-bound to perceive it, too overwhelmed by the bold sounds of the world to appreciate the constant ones.

I am learning to love the constant ones.