Kathryn Nicolai

speaker

1,487 appearances 6 recordings 2 series first heard Jun 2026 last heard 16 Sep

Kathryn Nicolai’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 6 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 2.

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Stories from the Village of Nothing Much · Spending Time, In the Early Summer (Encore) · 15 Jun 2026 podcast

An old greenish copper one.

That was screwed right into the clappered siding.

Its braided cotton pole had to be replaced every ten years or so, as all that time in the open air made husks of the fibers.

I'd never been able to reach it as a child, as it had hung an arm's length outside of the porch railing.

Then I thought it must have been placed carelessly, accidentally in a spot none of us kids could reach.

It wasn't till I'd grown arms long enough to wring it that I realized that it had most certainly been placed there by design.

We'd have wrung it every other minute just for the fun of hearing its clapper sing through its mouth.

At our house it was wrong almost exclusively at mealtimes.

To call all of us kids, as well as any strays we'd picked up from the neighborhood during the day, to the table.

There was a house down the street with four siblings, the last from the bottom the same age as me.

We drifted back and forth between our houses all day in the summers, riding bikes or running in bare feet over the lawns.

We ate wherever we were fed, like untamed animals, and I assume our parents must have made a few phone calls to sort out who was on lunch duty and who on dinner.

Who would make the giant pot of spaghetti that would stretch to feed all of us?

And who had the big box of popsicles in their freezer?

We would have loved to ring that bell.

Because now that I think about it.

I remember that we were consumed with signals, secret signals.

To call to each other.

To relay some desperately important information.

To let each other know where to meet and when.

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