Switching the Soundtrack Around

When I was a small girl, my sisters and I took turns having “sleepovers” at Grandma Jean’s house. This was a treat, when we’d get pampered and bathed in one-on-one attention. Literally bathed – Grandma Jean had a big, deep tub with bubble bath and bath oil beads. Her bathroom smelled like Camay soap, and she had a mirrored tray crowded with fancy perfume bottles in exotic shapes, some of them with puffy atomizers we could squeeze for a spritz of scent. Sometimes our grandmother took us to the beauty parlor, where we got “nailish,” – nail polish – and all the old ladies would coo over how cute we were, and give us sloppy lipstick kisses.

I was the youngest of the four girls, and while spending the night at my grandmother’s was a treat, it was also a little scary to be so far from my own house. To make me feel more at home when bedtime came around, Grandma Jean would busy herself outside my bedroom door with noisy activities – I don’t remember what, but it might have involved clattering dishes as she washed them, or listening to the radio. She was trying to simulate the comforting sounds of a household full of family – that background noise that provides the soundtrack to so many young lives.

It’s like hearing your parents talking in the front seat of the car, while you doze in the back. Or like listening to adults clink glasses and laugh downstairs at a party, when you’re already tucked into your bed. Or hearing your older sisters giggle and chat in the cockpit of the boat while you rock gently in your bunk below. You might not understand exactly what’s being said, or even what’s going on, but there’s a certain quality to those muted voices that makes you feel safe and easy.

Over the recent Thanksgiving holiday, I remembered those voices when I heard my own kids rattling around the house, gathered together with friends home from college. I’d be reading in the living room, and hear their laughter and conversation while they made cupcakes in the kitchen. Or I’d be making dinner, and hear them singing together, then playing the piano, then talking two rooms away. It was that same soundtrack of muted conversation and activity that I didn’t quite understand when I was small—this time with younger voices.

It was the sound of home.