The sights of spring in Saskatchewan are obviously astounding. They are one of the major reasons people, like me, who were raised in this province, stick around.
B.C. can have their stinking mountains and Ontario can have it’s stinking stinks and traffic and Quebec can have their stinking hockey team and their self-proclaimed cultural icons that I can’t recall ever being that important, plus the language police, and the Martimes can have their stinking fish and stinking snow and … well, I almost felt sorry for them this past winter.
Alberta can have their stinking oil wells and arrogant head offices and yep, we have some stinking wells, too, it seems, so it proves we’re not perfect, but pretty darn close! Besides our wells don’t stink as much as the Alberta wells!
What I witnessed one morning last week, however, were not just the sights and smells of spring (hello Estevan lagoons), but also the sweet sounds.
For some reason, on this particular mid-week morning, I absorbed an overabundance of spring sounds I had not always embraced before.
There were the morning geese who have a habit of flying immediately overhead on their way to the fields just north of the city to enjoy their breakfast buffet. It is a familiar sound, as is their return home to the Boundary reservoir later in the day. It’s just that on this particular morning, I was revelling in their happy honking. I enjoy these greetings in winter, too.
Then I heard that heavy tap-tippity-tap of a neighbourhood woodpecker who was enjoying his breakfast, courtesy of SaskPower. Woody likes to pound away at the street light standard located right near my front yard, or the backyard power pole. The sound resonates throughout the neighbourhood, especially in the crisp, clear morning air when there isn’t a whole lot of wind. Once in awhile he’ll even pick on a tree, and that sounds different. I chuckled at the sound of his mini-machine-gun manipulations.
Then, I keyed in on one of our local squirrels who lives nearby. He sat on my fence and emitted the unnecessary garbled warble they like to emit while flicking their tail back and forth in a pretend threatening manner. He wasn’t about to relinquish his peanut from the feeder and I wasn’t about to seize it either, but we still had to engage in our ritualistic Mexican standoff, just to establish our territories.
The air was filled with the sounds of the song birds, interspersed with the cackles of the non-song birds. It wasn’t harmony, but it definitely was spring and the sparrows who hang around all winter with their tiny chirps were probably happy to relinquish the lead vocals for the next few months.
As the morning advanced, the sounds of spring included yelps of delight coming from the kids in the playpark across the street. There were squeals, yells, laughter and verbal challenges that only kids know how to express.
The rolling crunch of skateboarders and push scooters added to the acoustic charm.
It was too early in the season for lawn sprinklers, but I could imagine them.
Then, there was the music coming from the speakers in the truck a neighbour was washing.
As the day wore down, there was the crackling of the fire pit somewhere in the neighbourhood, that assured me that spring was, for sure, here, as were the coyote howls in the valley just below my tiny estate.
Spring is most certainly here. Take my advice, don’t slow down, but rather stop and listen. There is more to the sound of our city than speeding trucks and train horns.
