We had some friends over this evening for a hamburger cookout on the back patio. We were talking about some of the wildlife we could see behind our home when Eric brought up the fact that an owl had made an appearance at their place (which backs up to the Little Arkansas River).

I immediately thought of times past and gone when I would hear a hoot owl (great horned owl) in the hackberry tree just outside my bedroom at home where we grew up. I was a teenager then, and the sound of the owl in the middle of the night brought shivers to me as well as a comfort in knowing that I was safe and warm. I usually went right to sleep again for the rest of the night.

Later in life, when I moved our family to that same place, owls once again would roost in the hackberry tree and hoot during the night. I felt that same strange combination of spine-tingles and comfort that carried me through those teen years. And in Oakley when we lived in our first house there, an owl would sometimes hoot during the night in the large tree out front. I’m not sure what it is about the sound of the horned owl that brings those powerful feelings to me. However, as I live and work in the Wichita area, I long for that sound to manifest and bring back the flood of memories and simpler times and lives.

As I write this, I am reminded of several sounds in that old house where I grew up. The great horned owl was one. Trains passing through town at night are another. We lived about ¾ mile away from the BNSF main line from Chicago to Los Angeles. Over 80 trains a day go through there at 70 miles an hour. The sounds carried far and wide. We could easily hear the trains.

Back when there was a switching yard at the railroad, sometimes locomotives would rumble as they started and stopped while switching at night. That low frequency rumble was sufficient to rattle a spring inside one of the windows in my bedroom. I got to where I listened specifically for that sound whenever I heard a loco in the distance. I loved that sound.

Our furnace made a peculiar sound just a few seconds after the blower came on. I could count on it and that sound, again, was comforting to me as I lay in bed.

Finally, probably the sound I miss most is the sound of our large black Labrador as she would come onto the front porch and plop down against the screen door in the middle of the night. I always knew when Dynamite (my son named her) was back from her nightly rounds of the neighborhood, and there was a certain comfort there, too, as I knew she kept a watchful eye out for unusual things. There is still, 15 years later, a worn place on the screen door where she lay.

The saddest sound of all was that same sound of Dynamite plopping up against the screen door one Sunday evening some 15 years ago. I knew it would be the last time I heard that sound, because the next day I knew I would put her down as she was full of cancer and was suffering too much. She’d already been to the vet. I already had made arrangements for him to come to the house and put her down rather than my hauling her there. Besides, I could bury her out back and come to the reconciliation that she was no longer with us much better that way.

I can remember that sound like it happened five minutes ago….