Thirty Wind Chimes

Utica Street in downtown Ithaca is one of my favorite places to walk. It's not terribly long (though it is longer than its near neighbor, Short Street) and it smells good, especially in spring and summer — the scent of flowers mingling with cooking smells. It's a quiet street, except for the sound of house construction and re-construction, which takes place in every season.

Yesterday I decided to put more focus into my walk, so I counted the number of wind chimes I saw on the porches.

Thirty.

That includes 4 bells that wouldn't chime on their own but might make a lovely sound if they were helped along by something stronger than a breeze.

For about half a block I was stuck at the number 13 and had to keep repeating "13, 13, 13, 13" inside my head so I wouldn't lose my place.

Then I came to a house with 3 wind chimes and after that I was on a roll.

Sometimes it was hard to distinguish a wind chime from a mobile, or a cleverly-disguised bird feeder. I was squinting up at a porch when a woman across the street said "Doesn't that remind you of the house on Irving Place?"

But it turned out she wasn't talking to me, she was talking to the man a few paces behind her. And she wasn't even referring to the house I was looking at.

Of course this made me wonder about Irving Place. Which I don't know at all. I do know a few men named Irving, though, so I thought about them for a while. There was my Uncle Irving, Mom’s older brother who died before I was born. And my parents' close friend, Irv Friedman. And a fella I knew in my early twenties, a truly wild man, he was also an Irving.

Perhaps I would have been named Irving, if I had been a boy.

By now the woman and man from across the street were far ahead of me, and the mystery of Irving Place remains, forever, unsolved.

I could have counted white butterflies instead of wind chimes. Or anything else: broken bicycles, hanging fuchsia plants, abandoned ladders, fire-hydrants covered over with weeds and wildflowers. 

But yesterday it was all about the wind chimes. It was such a still day. Not one of them made a sound.

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lazy afternoon
even the wind chimes
are napping