The Glorious Noise of Springtime

Can’t win for losing. First there was the construction noise. Now, there’s the construction noise.

For almost two months, the apartment building just uphill from our house got renovated from the ground up. Which meant a whole construction crew showing up and unlimbering their equipment at the crack of dawn each day—jackhammer, front-end loader, air compressor, the whole nine yards.

The only advantage I’ve found during a quarter century in this self-employment biz is the ability to choose your work hours. Which is both handy and necessary, because sometimes the puzzle of how to best construct a story that has defied your every solution for eight straight daylight hours will suddenly answer itself when you’re drifting off to sleep, at which point you can rouse yourself and get down to business until well past midnight or until the keyboard spigot runs dry, whichever comes first, and then catch up on your sleep the next morning.

Ear plugs are a miracle, in this regard. But the apartment construction crew, not wanting to be the only humans in the neighborhood active at 6:15 a.m., carefully chose hydraulic gear whose racket would easily pierce any self-respecting ear plug. As I can testify. And probably rouse a few folks from the cemetery, for good measure.

But all things, the good and the irritating, must come to an end, and thus the familiar crew finished up their work last week and moved on to other pastures.

Ah, peace, I thought. Now I can lie uselessly abed until 8 a.m. if the spirit moves me, after a long night.

That’s when the other construction crew moved in. The very next day. Flocks of birds that would scare Alfred Hitchcock. Hyper-active squirrels, the size of house cats. Loud buzzing insects of all varieties.

And that’s just the above-ground contingent; no telling what the earthworms, chipmunks, and gophers are constructing, just beneath the surface.

On the bright side, my heavy-duty ear plugs block out nearly all the bird sounds. Except for a giant woodpecker somewhere on the street, who must have taken lessons from the jackhammer operator because he (she?) can get up a head of steam at 6:14 a.m., like clockwork, and bring me wide awake, plugs and all.

Once the ear plugs come out, the whole bird chorus of springtime swells from all four directions, and the squirrels on steroids are doing something in the loft that sounds like a cross between bowling and square-dancing.

The way I see it, I’ve got three options. I can start working from 8 to 5 like a normal person. That’s out, because of the nature of the beast inside my keyboard. Or I can try sleeping in the basement under several layers of foam insulation, hugging an expensive white-noise generator from one of those mall stores next to my chest.

Or, I can do what every other sentient creature for miles around seems to be doing, these unspeakably gorgeous mornings that are springtime in every attribute except name. I can get my rear up at first daylight, and get with the program.

Springtimes may come and go, but I hear all these animals discussing with one another the fact that this springtime is to be like no other, an opportunity never to be matched again in this life.

I’d be a fool to miss it, they say. And, like them, I can sleep next winter.

Sounds like a plan to me.