Spending more time around the house these days (working from home) certainly offers a different life experience than what I was familiar with driving to an office every day. One thing that I’ve noticed since our move into the new house is that this house makes completely different sounds than the old house did. While being home for many full days now, I’ve had more time to experience these sounds fully.
The most pronounced sound comes more with winter than with staying home every day. Our heater, a heat pump, runs very often these days. The sound is strangely loud. It’s louder than my computer, which you’ll realize is saying something had you ever been near my computer to hear it. It vibrates everything, and I think that perhaps it is in need of service. It’s even loud outside where the radiator is. It’s weird, but it’s not the strangest sound in the cacophony.
While watching TV one weekend afternoon, I heard a strange popping noise that gave me the impression that the TV speakers were going out. I muted the sound ont he TV, but the popping was still there. Concerned that the house was about to fall down or something, I searched out the source of the sound.
It turns out that the back side of our house is in shade all day until the afternoon. In the afternoon the sun finally breaks over the roof and hits the siding. The siding, hit by the sun, starts to warm and expands. With the expanding, I suppose that some moisture making the siding stick together comes under stress and pops. A perfectly natural event makes for a frequent and strange sound inside the house.
There are other little things. In the old house, I could tell where people were in the house by the sound the floor made under their feet. You could tell when someone was coming up the stairs or walking across the dining room floor. You could tell what doors were open in an almost psychic way. The new house offers all of these sounds, but I am not familiar with them yet, and they are confusing to me.
A propensity for the rest of my family to walk heavily on their heels is a cause for much consternation for me. It always sounds like someone is stomping across the floor, and some latent primal fear of punishment kicks in in me. Awkwardly, it’s often Abby’s little thumping footsteps that trigger this reaction. And they echo.
The house is, I admit, quite big. There are a lot of open spaces. My ears still sometimes can’t tell where someone is when they speak from certain locations in the house. I can’t tell whether they’re on the first or second floor. The sounds echo around the foyer like the archways in a site we visited in India.
There was a building we visited near Agra that had these archways. The architecture was such that you could stand facing a corner in an archway, speak in a normal voice, and be heard clearly from the archway on the opposite side of the hallway, without being heard anywhere in between. Such is the case with our foyer.
I often find myself listening in the kitchen thinking that someone is in the living room, when they’re really in one of the bedrooms upstairs. It’s very confusing, but I assume I’ll eventually be able to distinguish those sounds. It amazes me how well honed my sense of hearing became in the old house, and I wonder how long it will be before I have a similarly tuned sense here, especially if I haven’t gotten it after four months.
There are also good sounds in the house. One of my favorites is our alarm system. No, the siren part is not what I’m talking about. One of the additional features of our system is that whenever you trigger a sensor by opening a door or window, the system will beep. This is great for when the kids are home and you want to make sure that they’re not heading outside without you knowing. But mostly I like the sound because while I’m concentrating on my work in the afternoon, I don’t miss when everyone arrives home.
