After all that rejoicing over all those things I was hearing for the first time since I was twelve after getting the latest-and-greatest hearing aids a year ago, all of that was starting to quietly…fade. I was loathe to admit it. I was still occasionally picking up sounds I didn’t used to but I was often having a hard time hearing ordinary conversations again. It was quite discouraging.

When I got them I was used to soft earmolds, and the new ones, given that they had electronics in the molds as well as the main part, were hard. My connective tissue disease responds to pressure as pain and the hard ones soon hurt, so John-the-audiologist had to make the molds shorter–which meant I heard less and they fed back more but at least it left me knowing that someday they could make them longer in a material I could tolerate better and I would hear even better come the day. Something to look forward to.

But not if my hearing itself was going down again. And feedback can cause that.

Two weeks ago it finally dawned on me that this past year of finally, finally, slowly getting my weight back (due to the funky thyroid) from my big Crohn’s flare of ’09–maybe that was the problem with the hearing. One changes weight in the face and the ear canals first when the pounds go up or down and it changes how sound is transmitted. It was worth a shot. Ten pounds? John totally confirmed the possibility. So I went in.

This time I’m used to using the harder-material earmolds and this time I know to put them in and leave them alone, no fiddling, do nothing to irritate.

John did the impressions, he sent them off, the new molds came back and we chose to try for longer again. Yay! I went back to get them last Thursday glad they’d come just in time to be able to hear Parker and Hudson so much better…

…And the right one broke in the technician’s hand as she was affixing it, to her great surprise.

It was okay, though. I meant I went off to see the grandkids with one ear much louder, hearing all kinds of new things again, and the other ear not–giving me extra time to adjust to the EVERYTHING IS SO LOUD changes.

I got to hear Hudson saying Yawrrr at twelve months after the pirate book reading. How perfect is that!

There is still some small chance the replaced earmold will come tomorrow, before I fly off to a memorial concert in honor of my late Uncle David. (Just me this trip.) Either way: it is enough.

And what got me to sit down and write all this. I was watering my blueberry bushes this evening when a seagull passed at a goodly height overhead, its cry faint in the distance.

I knew it instantly. And almost as instantly I realized that I only recognized the sound from my childhood. After all these years I was finally gull-ible again. Wow. And it’s going to get even better.

One other thing. Being too cheap to pay Turbotax the $25 for submitting the state taxes over the ‘net, I went to the post office today. There is a place where the Bayshore parkland lies just past the next road, where, as I sat at my light, there were two lanes of onramps to the side and nine lanes of freeway behind, cars, cars, cars, and tucked between the ramps and me was an oasis of a triangled culvert.

Green and lush in a way few places are in the drought we’ve been in and with a bit of water at the bottom. Overflow from the marsh starting at the other side of the road ahead, it seemed.

The most magnificently colorful duck dove in there, too fast to be sure what type.

And I looked across at the wetlands ahead and the mountains away on the other side of the Bay and this one little wildlife-sustaining spot of thick and thriving and green despite all that hedged it in and thought, Nature adores a backroom.