I take my digital audio recorder some places that I go — I’m resisting the temptation to call it a “tape recorder” — and sometimes to step outside the door and record the ambient sounds.

Such as outside my mother’s house in San Antonio last month. The birds were a lot livelier than in the cold Illinois I’d left, and the selection of birdsong somewhat different, though I can’t pinpoint the exact differences.

In Marathon, Texas, late last month the wind blew much of the night and into the morning one day. I captured 20 seconds of it, but it went on without much pause for hours.

The spring rainstorms in northern Illinois have been numerous and loud recently. This is what I heard from my front porch about 24 hours ago.

The rain had stopped by the morning and the sun dried up a lot of the puddles today. But not everywhere. The back yard is still marshy.