It occurred to me you can translate sounds into the familiar without realizing they actually aren’t. I was in a Melbourne hotel last Tuesday morning and woke to hear a positive gale in the trees outside. I winced. In another four hours I’d be flying home. If the wind was that bad would the flight be cancelled? I was missing Thunder and the farm. Pleasant though my stay in Melbourne had been I wanted to be home again. I lay there listening to the gale howl in the gum trees right across the road from my hotel window until I hauled myself out of bed to face the worst.
I glanced out of the window. Strange! The trees were motionless… but I could still hear the gale in the branches. I stared and suddenly realized that what I was hearing was the sound of a procession of Melbourne trams, with the noise of their wheels gliding along the metal rails apparently producing the same sound as a strong gale in the Farside shelterbelt trees. I was a lot happier once I understood that I’d be flying home as expected. It’s just odd that two such different things can produce such similar sounds. Not sure why I hadn’t noticed the sound before, possibly other traffic drowned it out, perhaps I wasn’t going home on the other days. Maybe there were more and earlier trams on the Tuesday after a holiday-Monday. But it did have me worried there for an hour or so.
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It is amazing to me that the first thing of Lyn’s I read this morning is so very similar to what I was writing early this morning. “…two such difference things can produce such similar sounds.” Such is this with homonyms and homophones, only they sound exactly the same! I wrote this this morning. If I may be so bold I’m posting it as it is very much farm a related little piece.
“Oh dear,” shivered Mum as she pushed the farmhouse door closed against howling wet wind. “It’s really pelting down. I worry about our animals on nights like this.” She removed her soggy raincoat and took off her muddy boots. “I’ll get a fire going,” said Dad. “Michael, help me with the wood.”
“Sure.”
“They’ll be OK, right Mum?” asked Sara.
“Our Ewes should be fine. There’s a row of sturdy pine along the fence-line which they can all snuggle close into. Our castrated males are in pens a little more exposed though. I’m especially worried about our oldest one. He may not have much longer.”
“That reminds me.” cried Sara. “It’s my turn to bottle feed, Old Willy. Right Dad?”
“Of course sweetheart, however I’m afraid it will depend.”
“On what?” Dad lit his match and set the newspaper alight “Whether the wether will weather the weather.”
Author
snicker, oh yes, you really sould come to the natcon, you’d fit right in, fandom would award that final line at least two pillows (for smothering punsters.)
Sounds dangerous… I’m in. And speaking of homophones are there any good inns in Duned-in. There a wild one I believe is called Buckle Inn.
Author
many years ago the Reader’s Digest asked for people to write in and list businesses that had suitable names, or that were owned by people with suitable names, and other variations on that request. Two that always amused me were, the woman named Rosa Wilde Somebody, who married a man named Bull and became Rosa Wilde Bull. Quite poetic. And the lady who remembered that, when she was a child in an English village, the minister, deacon, and sexton had been named Bean, Gawne, and Dunnit. (Or someone I knew years ago whose initials were P.I.G. Makes you wonder what his parents were thinking.)
Gawne and Dunnit. Lovit.