Sounds

Ross and I live in a second-floor apartment in downtown Denver, just off a very busy street. We also don't use our air conditioning. We're saving energy and therefore money. We keep our window and sliding door open all the time, and it is LOUD! But the noise has become part of daily life, and there's a pattern to it.

In the mornings, I am often awakened around 6 by the scream of an ambulance. There is a hospital two blocks away, and so ambulances are by far the most common emergency siren we hear. If that 6 a.m. ambulance does pass by, though, I notice how quiet it is as I fall back to sleep. Daily traffic hasn't started coming down Speer Boulevard by then.

If the siren doesn't wake me up, the mid-morning maintenance noises do. There's the crashing and clanking and glass shattering and diesel engine-rumble of dumpsters being emptied in the parking garages two floors down. And I think there can be no possible way the grass grows fast enough in this dry climate to necessitate mowing -- right below my window -- two or three times a week. But oh, the industrial lawn mower is persistent! Sometimes he comes at 8 and again at 10!

The traffic noise settles to a hum around eleven. Sometimes there's the ambulance again, or a car that needs a muffler.

Afternoon showers are relatively common here, which I am not used to. Rain usually hits central/eastern Kansas overnight, or in the morning, and I firmly believe that it's better that way. But my opinion be damned, many a mid-afternoon I hear thunder rumbling, or maybe the traffic lulls and the soft sound of raindrops hitting the leaves on trees outside is audible.

Then there's rush hour, which means the traffic hum gets louder and police sirens rise and fall as they go by and the whirrrrrrrr-clank of the garage gates opening and closing gets frequent and the voices of people talking loudly in the parking garages drift up through the windows.

After our fellow apartment-dwellers return from work, the traffic is a backdrop to people-noises. The man and woman on the balcony above us have cell phone conversations in Spanish (or is it Portuguese or Italian? I can't understand anything they say, but it's a Romance language), or sometimes adoring a small child (or dog?) in accented English. Dog owners in the courtyard whistle and call for their large dogs whom they have finally let out of the containment of small apartments and who cannot help but run free when they get the chance.

As the evening wears on, the emergency vehicles pass by with more urgency, and together -- the ambulances and police cars are joined by firetrucks bellowing, and the chorus makes it difficult to hear what someone is saying in another room. And speed demons on their motorcycles and hot-rods find nightfall the appropriate time to race down the street out of nowhere as loudly as possible, which causes me to jump.

And once we go to bed, especially on weekend nights but Wednesday and Thursday too (are these ladies' nights?), the traffic dies down and former frat boys and sorority girls relive their glory days in the parking garages and at the pool a few buildings away (but when it's quiet you can hear the beats and bass of some nameless rapper), and their drunken overly-loud voices saying stupid things and sometimes fightin' words echo through the garages and out through their open sides up through my window and keep me from falling asleep, and Ross and I comment to ourselves about the wasting of society.