Cacophonous Village

I live in an archetypal little New England village. My home is in a century-and-a-half old parsonage next to a very old church constructed of stone and sparkling stained glass. A few dozen steps to the north of my front porch, right next to a babbling brook, there’s a white sign with Olde Tyme-y lettering that reads Old Greenwich, 1640. A few dozen steps more, and there’s the cutest, most cunning little colonial-style library. And it’s all across the street from the village green, a lovely park surrounding a tidal pond where flocks of geese overnight during their migrations, and where turtles sun themselves on the banks. I have arrived home late at night to find deer at my back door.

Everything’s so green and lovely here. From my house sweeps a massive lawn shaded by mighty oaks. The green is surrounded by trees, and during three seasons of the year, flowers bloom in lurid colors everywhere I look. Our little downtown area, a two-block stretch of Mom and Pop businesses, is anchored by a traditional old schoolhouse at one end, and by a firehouse where on hot days the firemen wash their big red engines out front while a dalmatian thumps its tail contentedly to the side. The train station is over a century old itself—a red barn-like construction that sums up the village’s character. Unpretentious. Quaint. Beautiful, in the simplest sort of way.

You’d think that living here would be idyllic. In many ways, I suppose it is. In one, however, it is not.

This place is freakin’ LOUD.

There’s a road at the bottom of the church lawn, a two-lane stretch of asphalt that separates us from the gorgeous little jewelbox of a park. Two lanes of traffic hell, I meant to say—it’s the only access road to this section of the city of Greenwich, and boy, is it well-traveled. The most common sentence spoken in my household since we’ve moved here is “What?” As in, Craig will say something in his low-talking voice and it will be completely drowned out by the din of the traffic roaring by at high speed.

Or as in me yelling out to Craig to get some silverware for dinner and having him yell back, “WHAT?” from three feet away to make himself heard over the honking and the blare of sirens from that stupid quaint firehouse as those shiny trucks race by on their way to yet another conflagration. There were less fires in Detroit on Devil’s Night than there are here, daily.

The not-so-distant sound of a train horn followed by the rattle of tracks gives me a shivery feel, when I hear it late at night. Multiple times a day, from three blocks away, during peak commuting hours? Well, it’s not so romantic. At five in the morning, summers, we get the diesel-fueled roars of water trucks delivering their chlorinated payloads to the well-off around us with swimming pools, and for the weller-off who are completely redoing their homes for the third time in a decade, construction starts with percussive banging and workmen yelling at seven a.m..

Those geese that occupy the park, autumn and spring, have a tendency to buzz the house as they fly to the park, scaring us and the cats awake at all hours of the night. Once they’re there, they play and scold each other loudly. In springtime, the birds take up at four-thirty in the morning and begin to chirp throughout the many trees found in abundance in our neighborhood. Chirp, hell. They’re basically a lot of non-stop avian Rosie Perezes, yakking and complaining at the top of their shrill little lungs. Raccoons get into slap-fights and screech and yell past midnight like unwanted neighbors, and those picturesque deer knock over trash cans like bums in an alleyway.

Sometimes I find my trips into Manhattan a quiet aural relief. Quaintness has a price. Here, apparently I pay with my eardrums.