Remembered Sounds

My neighbor is doing some work on his house and, this morning, someone was using what I assume was a nail gun. The sound was rich and rhythmic, something between a tap and a thud. It was a sound that sent me thirty-or-more years back, leaving me a young boy sitting in a wood-paneled den and listening to my mother type her first novels. Her work came in these tap-thud bursts that I'm sure I didn't quite understand. But the sound of that typewriter--the sound of my mother writing--must have pushed deep into my mind. Lodged there. So that this morning, as I worked on my own writing, a nail gun reminded me of my mother in her literary youth.

And I wonder, in thirty-years to come, if my son or daughter will hear a soft clicking like a keyboard and think of me, still young and believing, sitting with a dark head of hair at the dining room table of their youth and writing books that now sit on their shelves.