A neighbor of ours nicknamed my family "The Loud Family." He and his family have since moved away. Come to think of it, the house next door to us goes up for sale about every three years.

He's right. My family is the loudest of all human-produced sounds. During the winter months our voices are confined indoors — come summer, the doors and windows to our house open, and our voices emerge like cicadas. By the way, cicadas are among the loudest of all insect-produced sounds.

I was born before the concept of inside voice versus outside voice. Growing up, my family had two voices, loud and louder. Our mom stood 5-feet tall, but her voice stood 10-feet tall. She would open the front door to our house and bellow, "Mimi! Come home! Dinner is ready!" Sometimes I was blocks away, inside Katz Drugstore and could hear her yelling for me to come home. Her summer mantra to my brothers and me was, "Keep your voices down. The windows are open, and the neighbors will hear you."

Now, I hold the vocal chords in my family. Like my dad, my husband rarely raises his voice, unless one of us bothers his stuff. For instance, when our oldest daughter came home to visit, she opened what she thought was a bottle of white wine and served it to her girlfriends. Her friends and she immediately ran to the kitchen sink and spit it out. They thought it was bad gin. It was grappa my husband had hand-carried from Italy back home. He was saving it for a special occasion, like our daughter's wedding day — should she ever marry. The next morning, he woke to find the empty bottle on the kitchen counter. He roared a four-letter expletive that shook the sleeping household awake.

People didn't complain about Ethel Merman's voice being too loud. In fact, critics hailed her powerful vocal chords. But I don't live on Broadway, so I make a conscious effort, particularly in the summer, to control the volume inside our house. Not an easy task for this hormonal mom, who cohabitates with a 'tweeny daughter. Now and again, I digress to a fishmonger's wife.

My husband and I had just arrived home from being out of town for a week. The first thing I do when I come home from a trip, take my luggage to my closet and unpack my things.

It was a closet invasion of the worse kind. While I was gone, our 'tweeny went on a weeklong shopping spree through my closet. My clothes were strewn everywhere. Shoes kicked off on the floor like Nordstrom's Great Annual Shoe Sale. I screamed, "#$@&*!$!"

My daughter ran into my closet. Broken, erratic sounds (much like a cicada) emitted from my mouth. She immediately yelled, "I didn't do it!" If I had a dollar for every I time I heard one of my kids say, I didn't do it, I'd be sipping wine on my own private island off of France.

"Keep your voice down. The windows are open." I hate it when my mother channels though me. Just then, the doorbell chimed again and again. I went downstairs to answer the door while my 'tweeny scurried to the safety of her bedroom. At the front door stood our new next-door neighbor with a frightened look on her face.

In a surprised voice she said, "Oh. You're home."

"What's up?" I said holding a 6-inch heel in one hand.

"I heard screaming, and well, I thought the babysitter was still … "

"Sorry. That was me. My daughter trashed my closet when I was away." She stared at me like I was speaking another language. Apparently, her boys never raided her closet.

"So everything's fine?" she asked in a low voice.

"For the moment."

She and her family have since moved away. We have a new family living next door to us. It's refreshing for me to hear, "Come inside. Dinner is ready! Go to your room! Keep your voices down. The windows are open, and the neighbors will hear you."

To find out more about Mimi Kopulos and read her past columns, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

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