A Love Letter to Sound

I took my hearing aids for their first walk in the woods the day after I got them, and my brain is still unpacking what I didn’t know I’d been missing.

Apparently, bird communities above my head arrange themselves in layers, hidden from sight most of the time save for a quick flash of wings and teasing me with their throat-filled songs as my head swivels about trying to spot them in the canopy. It’s an audible melange of industrious woodpeckers, taunting crows, the sharp scolding tones of a single blue jay and a handful of laughing towhees. I stand small below their feathers and tiny talons, at the base of trees that will always know more than I do, captivated and reluctant to continue on with the morning walk. Can’t I just stay here, in this green gilded place where time dissolves into the Eternal Now?

And did you know that a wet sycamore leaf underfoot has its own song to sing, a squishy and slurping sort of refrain that settles right behind the speaker nestled snugly in my ear canal while my feet keep sliding forward along the path, kicking more sounds upward to live in my head?

I am overwhelmed and overstimulated. And loving every minute of it.

Twenty some years ago, I had surgery to correct what was at the time significant hearing loss in both ears, caused by otosclerosis, a condition that renders the stapes immovable. The procedure, called a stapedectomy, replaces the smallest bone on earth with an equally small platinum filament that, when successfully implanted, gets right to work, doing its portion of the mighty and miraculous enterprise of carrying sound through our ears to our brains for processing, interpretation and sheer wonder. I had this done twice (once for each ear), six months apart and still recall the moment when I heard the water from a small desktop fountain in the room where I took my bi-weekly massages trickle and whisper down the resin and miniature rocky cliffs to land with a soft splash in the inch-deep reservoir at the base of the device. Face-up on the massage table, I let the tears run down my temples and past the top curve of my ears, enchanted and profoundly, wordlessly grateful. In the days and years that unfolded, I drank in every drop of sound around me. Woodpeckers who lived in the black walnuts and ash trees that lined the creek had been there for years and I never knew. The hum of traffic on Rt 661 a mile beyond the tree-lined farm fields felt loud and intrusive as I turned the corner on the walking path that skirted the western edge of the old cornfield. Patrick, has it always been that loud? I stopped cupping my left ear in conference room meetings at work to hear our soft-spoken medical director offer charting advice to one of the team’s nurses; her gentle tones landed clear and kind from the far end of the oval table.

When I’d noticed earlier this year that I couldn’t hear Patrick’s rhythmic breathing at night while sleeping on my left side, couldn’t hear the sparrows in the mulberries just on the other side of the bedroom window’s screen, I calmly made an appointment with the wizard physician whose skill had brought me back into a louder world all those years ago. The hearing tests confirmed what I’d suspected: my stapedectomies’ warranty had pretty much expired and it was time to consider other options, one of which was to do nothing. That surprised me, especially since the good doctor had discovered a small hole in my right eardrum. “It’s not urgent that we fix that, given its size”, he said. “Just don’t go swimming in any dirty lakes.” All other options were laid out before me, from redoing the stapedectomies to fixing the eardrum to trying hearing aids, each accompanied by a sliding scale of risk and benefits (and expense). Hearing aids intrigued me as the least invasive and most economical, though I wasn’t going to let cost alone drive my decision. I have yet to put an exact price on hearing Patrick tell me about his day or the papery sound of a just-plucked ground cherry’s husk in my fingertips.

So here I am, two weeks and some change from that first extended consultation with the hearing specialist who showed me how to put the almost-weightless apparatus behind each ear and insert the tiny dome-covered speaker into my ear canal, then hold the button for six seconds until the magic began. I now register every click of a coworker’s heels on the laminate wood flooring of our lobby, the piercing beep of the lunchroom’s microwave telling me my leftover cumin noodles and chicken are done warming up. The car groans and rattles in ways I haven’t heard before (a bit unnerving) and I’m certain I can hear two cotton balls rubbing against each other in their resealable bag hanging from the pegboard hooks at a nearby drugstore. Each maple leaf’s rustle in the late summer breeze is distinct, different and almost too much to bear. I suspect it won’t be long before I’ll be able to hear what Patrick is thinking (a prospect that worries us both). And it’s only been two weeks. There’s more to come, I know, and I’m bracing myself for it (eating raw carrots, pushing garlic cloves into the soil for next spring’s harvest, hearing the last of this season’s tomatoes ripen on their vines, the first snowflakes landing on the treated wood of the front deck and melting, the kittens shedding their fur before their morning naps…).

On that inaugural and audially indelible morning walk, the birdcalls and wet leaves and little fallen twigs and crickets who made themselves known to me now live in my head forever. I could have sworn I heard the sun reaching its golden fingers through the grove of musclewood trees as it hoisted up the day in all its cacophonous glory, a rich and still indescribable sound. I will keep walking until I find the words, which I secretly hope never happens as I move through this new adventure, grinning from one sound-soaked ear to the other.