apartment 1.

My mother loves wind chimes. When in doubt around her birthday, spring for wind chimes. I like them okay, maybe because they remind me of her.

I do own one set. They hang above my couch in the living room, which despite its proximity to the ceiling fan, is not a very windy spot. But the awful irony of wind chimes is that when you actually put them out in the wind, they tend to tear up and get battered and broken. Perhaps this is a marketing trick the wind chime companies came up with. My mom had one on the front porch with little porcelain doves. The noise it made was very pretty, but I tried not to look at all those headless and tailless birds very often.

My set is made of bamboo stalks, and they make a lovely noise as well, though I have to physically reach out and touch them to create that lovely noise. I bought them not long after I moved into this place as an audio reminder, not of my mother, but of 216 Howard Street, Apartment 1.

Apartment 1 was, appropriately enough, my first apartment. I lived there with two other girls, and then later with two girls and a husband, not mine. And in the kitchen of Apartment 1, which was painted yellow by me, there hung a bamboo wind chime from one of the pipes that came out of the ceiling. And even though the kitchen was not a very drafty place, I heard those chimes all the time.

The chimes hung down next to the light switch. Pavlov's dog drooled when he heard a bell, but me, I turn on the light when I hear a bamboo wind chime.

You heard it in the mornings when Ashley went in to make coffee. You heard it in the afternoons when I came in from class to make lunch. And you heard it at night when Krystal came in from going out to party. No matter when you heard it, you almays always heard the same tune, the same sequence of hollow notes, because we always hit them in the same way as our hands made for the lights.

I think we meant to move them. We just hung them there when we moved into Apartment 1 to get them out of the way. And then we didn't move them until two years later we we all left Apartment 1. We even had another set of metal chimes shaped like elephants that hung outside from the porch. And I don't remember what they sound like at all, not even the tone of notes that those elephants made in the wind. But I do remember the exact bong-da-long bong-bong of those bamboo chimes in the kitchen of Apartment 1 announcing that someone was home and the lights were on.

When I hit my own bamboo chimes hanging above the couch, they don't play the same bong-da-long bong-bong song the ones in Apartment 1 did. But I hear it in my head just the same. And I turn on the light.