Woody’s new novel “The Butterfly Tree” is available at Amazon (click here), other online retailers, and orderable at all bookshops.
From Woody’s column archives, winter of 2021, evoked by last week’s nighttime spring showers…
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Ask one hundred people to name their favorite piece of music and you are likely to get a different answer from each, from the Beatles to Beethoven, from country to classical, from Amadeus to Zeppelin.
This question came to mind the other night as a much-needed Southern California rainstorm was drumming madly on my rooftop and rat-a-tat-tatting against my bedroom windowpanes. Buddy Rich nor Keith Moon ever played more magnificently.
Rain is such a lovely lullaby, I thought, and before fully drifting asleep, cocooned warm and dry beneath a Hudson Bay blanket, I considered nature’s songs further. Reaching back in time, back to my youth in Ohio, back to humid summer weekends at our family’s modest cabin with a nearby pond and a not-far-off lake, I conjured up another magical melody: the chirping of crickets; joined occasionally by bullfrogs croaking their basso notes a short walk away; and in the distance, much less frequently, eerie-but-beautiful lonesome howls of coyotes.
Moreover, instead of counting sheep to fall asleep one could count a cricket’s chirps for 15 seconds, add 40 to that number, and arrive at an approximation of the outside temperature in degrees Fahrenheit.
Winter nights, where winters are truly winters, have their own soundtrack for inducing slumber. If you listen closely, eyes-closed closely, I swear you can hear snow falling. Rather, I suppose, one actually hears an absence of noise as the snow muffles out all but the loudest of sounds. All the same, it is a beautiful lullaby indeed for as Mozart noted: “The music is not in the notes, but in the silence between.”
Nearly as hushed as snowfall and softer than tap-dancing rain, with a cadence slower and more soothing than a cicada’s summer song, is to fall asleep to the whispered breathing of someone next to you. Here, too, the music is in the silence between notes, between inhalations and exhalations.
And yet, pressed to choose only one song to drift off to, I will opt for a percussion performance of waves crashing on the beach. Even in daylight, this is my favorite music, but at nighttime the ocean’s anthem is mesmerizingly magnified tenfold.
One of the magical properties of music is that it is a time machine. Hearing a specific song can instantly transport us back to where we were—and who we were—when we first heard it and listened to it frequently.
Such was the case for my wife’s recent birthday when our family, all seven of us, rendezvoused at a rented beach house in Avila Beach—or “Vanilla Beach,” as three-year granddaughter Maya renamed it—for a weekend celebration.
During the daytime, the cymbal-like crashing waves were largely drowned out by talking and laughing and all other goings on of life. But at night, after the moon rose and Goodnight Moon had been read to Maya and we had all later likewise retired to bed, the surf raised its volume pleasantly. Again, the music was as much in the silence—the sea rising into a gentle swell, rising into a wave, rising into a vibrating crest—between muffled oceanic thunderclaps.
Again I was transported back in time, back to 1972, back to age 12 when I spent the full summer at Solimar Beach with my godparents. For a kid from the Midwest who had never before seen any ocean, falling asleep nightly to the Pacific’s pacifying cadence was even better than listening to a rooftop symphony of rain or a concert of cicadas, coyotes, and bullfrogs.
All these years later, the surf’s song remains my favorite lullaby.
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Essay copyrights Woody Woodburn
Woody’s new novel “The Butterfly Tree” is now available in paperback and eBook at Amazon (click here), other online bookstores, and is orderable at all bookshops.
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Woody writes a weekly column for The Ventura County Star and can be contacted at WoodyWriter@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram at @woodywoodburn.