Last fall I went for a second hearing test to confirm what I already knew: I couldn’t hear well.
At the appointment I was fitted with a trial pair of hearing aides.
“Is this what everyone hears?” I asked – incredulous.
“Actually – it’s less. If I programmed them at full range initially, it would be too much,” said the audiologist. “We’ll work up to normal hearing capacity gradually.”
My eyes welled with tears.
“I’ve been missing a lot,” I murmured.
“Yes, you have.”
Tests confirmed that I had moderate hearing loss in the mid to low ranges and severe hearing loss in the high ranges. I was told that if there was no history of trauma, the decline was most likely genetic in origin. An MRI confirmed that assumption.
I wore my hearing aids home, overwhelmed by the barrage of noise in a car which had previously felt like a well-insulated tank. Now it seemed nothing but a rattly old jalopy buffeted by noisy winds and threateningly tinny in tone. Not nearly the sturdy old cruiser I had experienced it to be. I tried not to panic, and took calm cues from my husband’s normal demeanor in the driver’s seat.
At home, our dog Oliver clamored across the kitchen floor to greet us. “His nails!” I shouted. “They make noise!”
“You never heard that before?” asked my husband.
“No,” I said. “Everything makes noise. I had no idea.”
“Wow.”
The next few days overwhelmed me with sound.
The torrent of water from the tap startled me. A rush of noise surging from the kitchen terrified me until I took another calming cue from Ollie who seemed completely nonplussed. I hurried in and yanked open the dishwasher and the din stopped. It was just the appliance and not an airplane about to crash-land on our house. The cascading clamor coming from the living room was not the dog falling down the stairs, but just the sound of him trotting down the steps, as usual.
I learned that hearing loss isolated me more than I had known. I initiate and join conversations now, knowing that I will be able to respond with more than a dubious nod of the head. My improved acuity reminds me daily that everyone struggles with hidden challenges that no one can see.
When it is time to take them off, the abrupt hush prompts a momentary flutter of panic as I put them in the little box they came in each night. In the time it takes to do that, I am used to the familiar muffle that was my old baseline. My sister asked me what this was like. I told her that taking off my hearing aides is like turning off the lights for your eyes. My brain seems relaxed in knowing that this is not my straining-to-hear-mode anymore, but a strange new portal to a peace and quiet place.
I open the refrigerator door and lift the bright red carton from the top shelf middle.
“Here,” I say, handing him the carton.
“Well, you could at least pretend to have trouble finding it,” he blurts.
“Test this for salt,” he says.
I dip into the pasta water and scoop out a hot noodle , spooning it into my mouth, tasting for – something.
“It’s fine.”
“Are you sure?” he asks.
“Yes, ” I say – never certain what the right amount of salt should taste like.
And so goes a usually comfortable, sometimes testy conversation in our marriage.
He identifies flavors with finesse, yet his eyes steer him deftly around the unseen vacuum cleaner at the bottom of the stairs waiting to be carried to the second floor.
I blindly locate a Lilliputian cheese knife from the mass of tangled silver in the utensil drawer, yet the difference between Godiva and Hershey remains lost on me.
“Does this tie go with this shirt and pants?”
“No.
“It doesn’t?”
“Your tie should have a color in common with the rest of your outfit.”
Thoughts of the Slice of Life Challenge taunted me with flutters of excitement and anguish. On the up-side, a blog a day this month will neatly usher me through the final weeks of winter, buoyant that my last Slice will be solidly into warmer weather and longer days of spring. On the down-side, I am flummoxed to find a portion of my day for writing without resorting to setting my alarm earlier than it already is.
My time dilemma began to vanish however, with the simple act of picking up my phone. A downward glance revealed the banner across the screen smugly announcing that my phone usage time was up 17% from the previous week, inching threateningly toward the two hour mark.
What?
How is this possible?
This can’t be me – I spurn intrusive technology! Loathe it!
We haven’t had a TV in decades and yet my screen time is inching into dastardly realms of inexcusable quantities of wasted life moments?
This has to stop!
With that declaration, my lenten promise was born: no facebook for forty days.
So there it is – my almost-two-hours-long blogging niche carved neatly out of each day without a moment’s set-back to my alarm clock.
Instead of scrolling my screen, I’ll be creating and accomplishing on it.
I used to take my dad’s hammer out to the backyard to look for good rocks to crack open. Scratching through the leafy detritus in the woods behind our house or in the azalea bushes which held promising specimens among their gnarly roots, I would heft a few hopefuls onto the driveway and strike them repeatedly with the hammer, the vibrations coursing up the wooden handle into my arm, sharp metallic strikes splitting the air, assaulting my ears. Eventually, a crack would fall open to reveal the core. Some offerings would be just what one would expect, much the same inside as on the outside, rusty brown gray with flecks of earthy color here and there. Others revealed the surprise I was hoping for. Nondescript smudged buff exterior belied a spectacle within, as if someone had taken a snow globe and poured its glittery crystals inside an ordinary rock, hidden from all but the most curious excavators.
I recently surmised that rocks might be my favorite non-living thing, and memories of driveway geological forays gives me reason to note that my fascination is not new. Along those lines, my family was recently persuaded to accompany me to a rock and fossil show at a local convention center. There I settled on two specimens out of thousands to take home: a swirling, speckled orb of Ocean Jaspar – reminiscent of a dappled planet, and an egg of butterscotch-burgundy Carnalite – both harvested from Madagascar.
Returning to the show the following day I roamed the banquet, this time choosing 14 polished hearts – one for each of my students.
That Friday, the day before spring break, I invited my students to choose a heart rock at the end of class. They oooh-ed and aaah-ed, looked, touched, and each closed fingers around a small, dense parcel of earth tucked in the hollow of their palm. Perhaps unnoticed by most, it was a brief encounter with Mother Nature, offering herself to anyone who cares to notice beauty in an ordinary rock and the comfort of a smooth stone in hand.
My mother was a connoisseur of confections who waxed poetic about Butterfingers and Clark bars the way a sommelier does wine. She had stashes of candy hidden around the house, mostly from herself. One of her favorites was black licorice, and I joined her in that revery. If memory serves me right, we were the only two in the family to enjoy it.
Shortly after she died, I found myself inexplicably devouring black licorice. Bags of it – daily. I would stop at a grocery store after school to buy one or two bags, tear open a pouch in my car and consume the entire thing in one sitting, finishing it well before I got home minutes later. I couldn’t get it fast enough.
I wondered when this compulsion would end and how much weight I would gain if it didn’t. I mentioned it to a friend and she attempted to assuaged my fears, confiding that when her mother died she ate stacks and stacks of pancakes after work every day. She said she couldn’t help herself, and neither could I. Empty licorice bags littered my school totes, dresser drawers, and glove compartment. I imagined this was the way of a junkie craving a fix.
It was mine.
I worried superficially, but deep down I didn’t really care. I consoled myself, reasoning that there were a lot worse things to be addicted to. It kept going. For half a year I ate bags and bags of black licorice.
Then one day – just like that – it stopped. I didn’t want it or need it anymore. I wondered why I was satiated, and was relieved at the cessation of a physical craving so real, I could not have imagined it possible.
To follow is my inaugural attempt at a sonnet, dedicated to that ebony confection and the lady who started it all.
She is a tiny thing, bundled in faded comfort, elfin face peeking out from an old fur-rimmed hood. I am also layered in a worn jacket from way back that still coddles me like a portable sleeping bag. With scarf wrapped and hood pulled up, I am as warm as soft butter inside that yellow wrapper.
We pass each other three times each morning. Asian music wafts to me, on air – from within the folds of her coat – as she passes. She raises a slight hand and smiles a greeting – I do the same. She on her walk, I on mine.
Musing on my path, I mull over the twists and turns our lives took to bring us to this same place and point in time, two passers-by, gaining comfort in the sight of each other. I presume she lived in China for many years before coming here to live with children and grandchildren, while I lived in several states and then oversees before settling down just around the corner from her and where we walk each day.
Three times around is exactly one mile, which is all I have time for on a school day. Steve and Ollie accompany me for the first lap, but then beg off to ready the kitchen while I finish up my mile and then head home for breakfast and coffee. I am not sure how long she walks; she seems like she could go for quite awhile, keeping an easy pace for a woman of many years.
We have never spoken or stopped to talk, and I don’t know her name.
Just the same, I see her each morning and am happy when I do.
It seems a small thing, but great comfort lies in the familiar rhythm of morning.
For blogging for the entire month of March without missing a day, and for co-leading a “Spirituality of Knitting” retreat to close it out, I am changed.
Through my weekend retreat, I learned how women are changing the world one stitch, one blanket, one shawl at a time. Needle crafts are meditation in motion with a gift of warmth for someone in need at the project’s end, and hours of mindful focus for the crafter in the process.
Through my month of blog posts, I learned how to notice more and to think differently. I learned that I have stories in me that had never been told – that I knew not were there.
I dream at night now.
I crochet now.
I have a friend in Cambodia, now.
All for the gray, gusty, teaser month of March.
For the first time – ever, I don’t want it to end.
Thank you fellow crafters, for all you have taught me and shared with me.
Thank you fellow slicers, for all you have taught me and shared with me.
Some of you inspire with what was once a blank page, and others with what was once a skein of yarn.
I experienced humanity at its best, and I had the good fortune to be a part of it – twice.
My best March ever ends today.
Go ahead and ask me about today,
but don’t ask me about yesterday because I was a different person then.
I was about to enter those words as my comment to someone else’s post but thought the better of it. They have become my slice, instead.
The days are endless but the years fly by.
This is the best description of parenthood that I know.
When the kids are very young, days and nights blur into a fogginess that knows no clear delineation. When parental sleep cycles eventually temper back to humane, the mornings still start before sun up and yet the work is never done, even when stretching to finish way past sundown, folding that last load or making one more sandwich for the morrow’s lunches. It’s a long time with long days.
Fast forward through those years of long days to high school. Everybody is “awake” and out the door by 6:45 a.m. and yet miraculously still up eighteen hours later, making pizza or baking cookies at midnight. Same hours as in infancy, but the bodies are much bigger, and louder. It’s a long time with long days.
Now, the house is nearly empty and time moves differently. The kids are young adults – two teachers and a plumber, and our hours are mostly our own. We can almost rise and set with the sun, if we choose to.
The days were endless and the years flew by.
We seem to have gotten where we are in the blink of an eye.
Now, the years slide together and the days have slowed to – just right.
Just right to look back and wonder how we got here so darn fast.
Just Sifting 