sonidos .. sounds

For some reason have been thinking recently about the sounds of Paraguay ... how I try so hard to tell the difference between the way the roosters sound swooshing through the leaves in my front yard and the sounds of pigs, the sounds my neighbor makes when herding her cows (Ish! Ish!), the sound of the wooden fence posts being dropped one at a time at 6am to let out those cows, the “hola che loro” call of my neighbor’s loro bird. The sound of tree branches on my roof or wind that blows through my little wooden walls. How I can differentiate now the sounds of motos vs. bus vs. trucks on my street. How I keep mistaking the sound of my neighbor’s pressure cooker for my water boiling (since her kitchen and mine are a mere 5 ft apart and we always keep the windows open). My little 3 year old neighbor has learned to knock sometimes but sometimes if I’m in my room I can hear the swoosh swoosh of his little feet on my smooth concrete floors if he comes in to play with the magnets on my fridge. A few months ago at a birthday party for some reason the parents decided to give away whistles, and for days and days on end all I heard were whistles up and down the block. Paraguayan roosters don’t say “cockadoodledoo,” well neither do American ones – they say “cocorococo,” all day long.

On another note, in a movie I watched tonight I was struck by a sound I haven’t heard in years - the kitikat kitikat of the elevated train tracks in parts of Brooklyn and Queens. I know I need to be taking more photos of the things I’m seeing here, but it’s a shame I can’t capture some of the sounds.