Not all bad sounds are cuss words.

These days, “Pfsssh…” is a bad word for me.

The cart we pull around our yard behind a mower or an ATV was lopsided the other day.

“Pfsssh…” was what I heard when I bent my ear to be near the wheel.

A little Fix-a-Flat and a lot of hand-pumped air silenced that “Pfsssh…” at least for the moment. We’ll see whether the suspected leak around the bead sends me on a hunt for a replacement wheel.

“Pfsssh…” also came into play last weekend while I sojourned at the home of my younger daughter. I had toted along a previously comfortable and reliable twin size air mattress, to be deployed in the playroom.

“Swooshhumm….” went the new-fangled inflater thingie contained inside a black rectangular control panel on the end of the mattress, which is a great improvement over the separate swoosh-it-up inflaters that were required just a decade ago. A queen size air mattress of that design gathers dust in a closet, perhaps to be pulled out if we get an unexpected inundation of grandchildren. I should pull it out and inflate it to test for dry rot or other air mattress perils. Then again, I should test our portable gasoline powered generator once a month. I should restart the put-away snow blower once a month. I should … you get the idea. Those theoretical prudent maintenance chores got shunted to the bottoms of my to-do lists for so long that I eventually just stopped bothering to copy them when I redid the lists.

So I was not prepared when the air mattress I had brought to Natalie’s home inflated just as expected, then shut off … and “Pfsssh…”was clearly audible from somewhere near the control unit.

Investigation revealed that the hard plastic control unit had separated a bit from the soft plastic of the air mattress. Repairs would need to await a return home.

Natalie and her husband Matt hauled out their own earlier generation queen size air mattress. It inflated properly. However, it lacks the new-generation “never flat” gizmo possessed by my twin size mattress. This gizmo senses when the air mattress loses some air pressure during the night, as virtually every air mattress does. Softly, with a barely audible hum, the new-fangled air mattress will reinflate itself to body-supporting rigidity.

But, alas, that air mattress was out of commission. I left the queen-size mattress plugged in. Sure enough, it lost a bit of air during the night. In my younger years, this would have been an annoying problem, leading as it does to sore back muscles from being encased, like Jonah inside the whale, rather than snoozing on a stable platform.

These days, though, “Nature calls” two or three times a night. So it was almost no trouble to crank the dial on the deflating queen size mattress to “on,” toddle to the bathroom and back, then shut off the reinflation process and settle down to sleep on a restabilized inflated mattress.

I was too sleep-addled to remember whether “Nature calls” or “Pfsssh…”was responsible for my next two awakenings, but refilling the mattress while emptying my innards combined to give me a decent night’s sleep.

I dislike “Pfsssh…”almost as much as, in younger years, I had learned to hate “Dripppplop,” the water-dripping sound that seemed to showcase my ineptitude at plumbing every time I tried to fix a leaking sink or toilet. I no longer hate Dripppplop” because, these days, I cannot bend and twist myself into the pretzel shapes it takes to fix balky plumbing. Instead, I call the plumber and write the checks.

“Dripppplop” also can signify a leaky roof. We had that last fall. The roof repair guru used furring strips and nails to fasten a large tarp over the porous section of roof for the winter. The tarp should be gone soon, along with a chunk from my checking account, as the springtime temperatures return to tolerable roof-replacement levels.

There are other household sounds, seemingly innocuous by themselves, that portend trouble: “Scritch, scritch” for red squirrels or chipmunks in the attic crawl space; “Skitter, rustle” for mice seeking food in the innards of our kitchen cupboards; “Skeereeek!” coming from a sticking, about-to-break, door hinge or latch; “Vrmmmm/putt/ka-vrmmm” from a misfiring motor on a mower, chain saw or trimmer, that will require a trip to a service center.

“Pfsssh…”seems to be the sound du jour these days. Earlier in spring, I heard it from not one mower tire, but two, as I reinflated them during pre-mowing maintenance. Home repair fixed one. The other needed a trip to Dunlap’s to find and fix the leak.

Perhaps I need to come up with a countervailing sound that will offset the shivers and willies caused by “Pfsssh…” and its compatriots.

Hmm. Dinner bell, perhaps? I like that.

¯¯¯

Denny Bonavita is a former editor at newspapers in DuBois and Warren. He lives near Brookville. Email: denny2319@windstream.net.