Crunch, crunch. I love fall. I love walking through layers of leaves, leaves that have been blown into temporary hills on the sidewalk or rake-able piles that cover the grass. I love the sound they make when I tread over them or walk through them. Think about it. You can never really hear your own footsteps directly, but you can hear the brittle yielding sound a pile of drying ochre leaves make under your weight. The sound serves as an unmistakable reminder that you are moving through the earth plane. Your body has weight, significance. You are capable of traversing distance. You’re passing through…something.

While walking down my block today, I saw a small gaggle of four year-old girls with blond hair and lavender jackets. Their mothers, watchfully standing nearby, bounced younger siblings in comfortable cloth slings wrapped around their chests. “I love leaves,” I roared as I took several high but very tiny steps through the pile of leaves on their front lawn. My gait was unconsciously calculated to achieve maximum decibels. Maximum crunch.

The girls giggled at me. Their young mothers smiled knowingly. A person is never too old to enjoy hearing crunch, crunch, crunch as they walked.

As I left the girls’ giggles and their mothers’ expressions of understanding behind me, I kept thinking about the gift of sound. There is so much wonder and joy, so much beyond the crunch of leaves to think about.

I get a kick hearing the plunkkk-swoosh of a kid doing a cannonball off the high dive at the community pool, or the erratic, circular swizzz-swizzz buzzing sounds of a fireworks show. Even without seeing an explosion, I can imagine a small object being catapulted towards the heavens. I will grimace, then sigh when I hear the sound of squealing brakes, thinking that an accident has just been averted. I’ll shift my eyes quickly, to see if anyone is looking, when I hear my own stomach growl. It’s nice to remember that it’s my stomach, not my head, that actually gets hungry.

I’ll smile at night when I’m stretched out in bed, my mind dancing on the in-between, between the fascination of my thoughts and the allure of having no thoughts, and I’ll zero in on the rhythmically shifting sound of the bed frame in the apartment above me. I’ll think “Someone’s making love. Good for them.”

Why do sounds affect me so?

I love language because it’s intentional. Language is all about our need as people to feel understood by others. Sometimes words fail, but I want to believe I can put my experiences into language and share them with others. I like to travel with a loved one, a journalist or a poet, through their words, too. But I love pure, unadulterated sound; the unfiltered, uncensored, direct awareness that an event has occurred. When I focus on the sound a drawer makes when it’s being opened, or the sound a spoon makes when it is mixing cream and sugar into a cup of coffee, or the sound the book I take to bed makes, the last waking thought that registers, when I knock it out of bed and nod off – all these are little delights. Through sounds, I become very conscious that daily life events are worth noticing.

The sound a key makes when it is finally aligned with the channel of a lock is no small thing.