By Leah Corbett · Swift Current, Saskatchewan

“I taught 2,300 teenagers to listen. Now my own hands are telling me it’s time to stop.” — Why a 71-year-old prairie music teacher is selling her last hand-tuned copper wind chimes at cost, before her shaking hands put the files down for good.

Audrey Kerr at the door of the old grain Quonset behind her house in Swift Current.

Audrey Kerr hangs a copper tube from a piece of string. She taps it once with a small wooden mallet and tilts her head. The note rings out across the Quonset. “Hear that wobble?” she says, without looking up. “It’s flat. Like a trumpet section on a Monday morning.”

For thirty-eight years, Audrey ran the school band at the high school in Swift Current. About 2,300 students passed through her band room. Every one of them heard the same rule: stop blowing so hard, and start listening.

Since she retired in 2016, she has used that same ear on something new. In the old grain Quonset behind her house, she makes copper wind chimes. She tunes every one by ear.

The Wind Chime That Told Her Family a Storm Was Coming

Her father’s chime from 1961, still at her back door. Every new chime hangs beside it first.

Audrey grew up on a grain farm near Gull Lake, Saskatchewan. In the spring of 1961, her dad Lloyd built a wind chime from copper pipe left over from the new farmhouse plumbing. He hung it on the porch. Audrey was six.

On the prairie, that chime was not decoration. When it turned low and fast, the wind had swung to the northwest. Her dad brought the cattle in. Her mom ran for the clothesline.

“Dad didn’t know a note from a nail,” Audrey says. “He cut those pipes by eye. But when that chime went low and fast, we all knew to run.”

The chime hangs by her back door today. It is sixty-four years old, and one tube is still dented from a hailstorm in 1976. Every chime Audrey makes hangs next to it before it is packed. “If mine sounds like it’s trying too hard,” she says, “it’s not finished.”

A Band Teacher, a Quonset and a Pencil Notebook

The music stand came from her old band room. Now it holds her notebook of tube lengths.

The Quonset used to store seed wheat. When Audrey retired, her husband Doug cleared it out and built her a workbench from old granary boards. A small wood stove keeps it warm enough in January. CBC Radio plays quietly in the corner.

On an old music stand from her band room sits a pencil notebook. In it is every tube she has cut since 2016: the length, the note, the date. More than 1,100 chimes so far. Each one takes her about six hours: cutting, filing, listening, filing again.

Her old clarinet case sits on a shelf. Her border collie, Tuba, sleeps on a horse blanket under the bench. “Thirty-eight years of teenagers,” Audrey says. “This is the quietest band I’ve ever had.”

What 38 Years of School Bands Taught Her About a Wind Chime

The last tiny bit taken off the end of a tube decides the note.

Audrey’s chimes look simple. Four copper tubes, a copper cap with a small animal on top, and a striker in the middle. But she built every part around the sound:

• “The Concert B-Flat Chord.” Every school band in the world tunes to the same note, concert B-flat. Audrey tunes her four tubes into one chord around it. “Four voices, like a little brass section. Not four strangers.”
• “The Low-Brass Copper Voice.” Copper is heavier and softer than aluminum. The sound comes out deeper and rounder. “More like a French horn down the hall than a bicycle bell.”
• “The Prairie-Weather Finish.” There is no paint to crack at forty below or peel in the July sun. The copper simply darkens over the years, just like her dad’s old chime.
• “The Fifty-Kilometre Test.” In Swift Current, the wind hits 50 km/h most weeks. Every chime hangs on the Quonset through one windy day. If the striker rattles or a tube knocks, it goes back on the bench.

Turn Your Sound Up — This Is What a Band Teacher’s Wind Chime Sounds Like

No clatter, no rattle. Just four notes that sit together, carried on the wind. “That’s a chord,” Audrey says. “That’s what I spent 38 years teaching.”

How an Owl, an Old Horse and a Hummingbird Ended Up on Her Bench

Owl, horse, hummingbird, dragonfly, butterfly and angel. Each one started with a person.

Audrey never planned to put animals on her chimes. People kept telling her who a chime was for. “You can’t put a person on top of a chime,” she says. “So you put the thing they loved.”

The owl is the one she heard every winter night as a girl, calling from the trees behind the farm. The horse is Dolly, the old mare she rode to the one-room school. She made it for Doug on their fiftieth anniversary. The hummingbird is for her sister Bea in Kingston, Ontario, who has them at her kitchen window every July.

The dragonfly comes from the farm pond on hot July afternoons. The butterfly is now the one people order most. And the angel first hung beside the stage at her last Christmas concert with the band. Since then, people order it for gardens where someone is missing.

A chime on the test rail behind the Quonset. Out here the wind never fully stops.

The Day the Tube Started Shaking in Her Hand

These days, Doug holds the tube while Audrey files. They both know that can’t last.

Every morning, Audrey walks out to the Quonset after breakfast. The stove ticks. The wind hums on the metal roof. Then comes the moment she loves most: four tubes ring together for the first time, and the chord settles. “That’s when it sits down,” she says.

Two years ago, her hands began to shake. Her doctor in Swift Current told her it will not get better. To tune a tube, she has to hold it still on its string and take tiny bits off the end with a file. Now the tube shakes on the string, and the note shakes with it.

“You can’t tune a tube that won’t hold still,” she says. “I’d rather stop while the chimes are still right than keep going and send out something that’s off.”

So the chimes on the rack in the Quonset are the last. There will be no next batch.

“That’s My Band, Still Playing”

Where Audrey hopes her chimes end up: on a deck or back porch, heard every day.

Friends in town tell Audrey she should charge more. She just laughs. “I had a good career and I have a teacher’s pension,” she says. “I don’t need to make money on the last ones.”

So she sells her last chimes for about what the copper and the shipping cost her.

What she wants is simple. She wants them out in the wind: on decks in Moncton, back porches in Kelowna, by a kitchen door in Brandon. “A chime in a box is just pipe,” she says. “If somebody has a coffee outside and listens to one, that’s my band, still playing.”

Audrey isn’t on Facebook. Her old second clarinet from the class of 2002, Jillian, set up the online shop. Jillian posted a short video of her own dragonfly chime and woke up to seventy-four messages, most of them from old band kids. Audrey still writes a card by hand for every order, with the note of the lowest tube written on it.

“It Sounds Like a Band Warming Up Far Away” — What Canadians Say About Audrey’s Chimes

Sent in by a reader near Brandon: “Hung it on the porch. Now I sit out every evening.”

• ★★★★★

  “My old store chime went straight into the garage after this arrived. The sound is soft and deep. Even my husband, who hates wind chimes, likes it.”

  Sharon M., Brandon, MB
• ★★★★★

  “I played trombone in Mrs. Kerr’s band in 1989. When I heard this chime, I swear I could hear her counting us in.”

  Kevin L., Calgary, AB
• ★★★★★

  “Bought the hummingbird for my mom’s eightieth. There was a handwritten card from Audrey in the box. Mom read it twice and cried.”

  Tracy D., Peterborough, ON

Before You Order — What People Ask Audrey Most

More From the Porches They Landed On

• ★★★★★

  “I’ve had cheap chimes for years. This is the first one that actually sounds like music.”

  Gary P., Kelowna, BC
• ★★★★★

  “The owl is beautifully made. You can tell a real person tuned it, not a machine.”

  Diane R., Moncton, NB
• ★★★★★

  “We had a real prairie windstorm last week. It never rattled once, just kept ringing.”

  Wes B., Lethbridge, AB