pitch

I cannot seem to stop myself from singing along with my refrigerator. I catch myself again, chopping something in the kitchen and humming the same tune I seem always to be humming in the kitchen, a mountain tune from Norway, one the seterjenter would have sung in imitation of the willowbark flute. It is only a few notes, though I cannot play it on my own seljefløyte.

Why always that tune? And then I hear it, the motor in the refrigerator. That is the first note, and the last, and several in between. It might be the fundamental, but knowing next to nothing about music, I wouldn't know. But that is what keeps happening; I match that note before I even know I heard it, and then unthinkingly I trill the rest of the tune. Meantime the refrigerator drones under the melody like the resonator strings of the hardanger fiddle, like the long pipes over the shoulder of the piper, half-forgotten as he fingers the chanter.