A new amaryllis open, another about to be, and a third coming up behind.

“Is the background music in here always this loud?” I asked Richard as we sat in the clinic’s pharmacy waiting area. I had only barely ever heard it before, just enough to know of its existence, but wow, it was enough to drown out a conversation. Who knew.

“I don’t know. I’ve never noticed it before.”

The idea of being able to have music you can totally hear but don’t have to consciously acknowledge–I can barely fathom it.

In the evening, I was trimming back the heavenly bamboo (which isn’t actually bamboo) to get a little more sunlight on the August Pride peach and snipped back some of the berries. I was feeling guilty for depriving the birds of a possible treat and out of curiosity googled the plant after I came back inside. We have a whole long row of them.

Nandina. All parts of it are toxic. Birds can eat some of the berries but too much will kill them, particularly cedar waxwings (which I love and rarely get to see). Considered an invasive species in many areas.

Y’know, I might go cut that back some more. The former owner of this house isn’t even alive anymore, she won’t mind in the least.

Meantime, the left side of a baby sweater is finished and the right side is coming along. To be continued.

Can you believe Hudson is three weeks old as of yesterday? With the best mom in the world.

I told the audiologist today that I had taken to turning the hearing aid volume down two notches to avoid the feedback and it seemed to work while not impacting the sound too much–and I can always kick it back up as needed.

He, meantime, took the aids apart and put the new molds on.

No feedback. But the sound was noticeably different. And not in a good way.

“Does it sound hollow?” he asked me.

“Yes!”

“The base is too loud. Happens sometimes as an effect of going further into the ear, but I can work on that via the settings.”

That helped some, and I’m giving these a try, but so far I want to go back to the others. It’s definitely nice to have options, though. While we were at it we bought a clip-on bluetooth mike that I can pass around a room or hand to a speaker. Lanyard now added. I’ve wanted something like that forever and now I have one!

And: this afternoon I was looking through a skylight and happened to see Coopernicus! Perched near the top of the neighbor’s tall tree, and I got to watch as he suddenly dove down.

I walked to the other side of the house but he was faster than me, which certainly wasn’t a surprise; there was not a critter in sight near the feeder. Not even a squirrel.

Friends dropped by tonight and we experimented with/without the remote mike–either way, I heard them far better than I ever have before. Cool. Next round, hearing grandsons!

Sunday School. Dave was speaking.

Dave was in high school when we lived in New Hampshire and we knew him and his family there from church. It was quite a delight to have him end up here, well after we did. We were young parents then; he’s the father of his own young family now.

Your average microphone amplifies all frequencies, which isn’t as useful as you might think for those who are actually hearing impaired since impairment is nearly always in the upper frequencies, and when you’re hearing s and f and th sounds at a thousandth the power that everybody else is, amplifying the lower pitches too simply blasts those consonants right off the hearing chart; so for us, all a mike really does is amplify the vowels. The vowels do shape the consonants around them so at least you can make a guess at what the actual words are, so that’s something at least, but it takes all one’s concentration, and seeing the person’s face to help fill in the gaps is almost a requirement. Skip the mike? Well, there’s a reason they call it speaking up: the pitch of the voice does exactly that. Eh, it’s a given–pass the mike.

I have so often wished it were polite to knit in there, for patience’ sake…

I had the new hearing aids on.

I craned my neck a bit to see who they’d passed it to. Dave was at the far end of the room, I’d say about 20 feet away, barely visible past everybody, and I suddenly noticed two things:

The usual soft babble of baby noises and occasional chattered aside to the point at hand were absent; all was still as he spoke.

And I was hearing every. single. word.  And clearly. Granted, Dave has a deep voice and that always helps. But in that room that I have sat in for many a Sunday for many a year, where I have heard zero whispers there or anywhere, where I so often haven’t been able to hear the person seated two seats away–no chattering with me, folks, I’m so well behaved, and too often have heard only a little of what those actually holding the mike were saying…

There it was in his hand.

Every. Single. Word.

So this is what it’s supposed to be like.

I had no idea. I was suddenly overwhelmed at the sight of it as I sat at a red light. I keenly missed him all over again, was keenly aware of the injustice done him for which he forgave so freely, and I wondered how his wife and kids are doing. I should take that as my cue to go make the effort to find out.

They just finished an addition on the street side of the high school my kids went to, and in the shade of a massive, beautiful old oak tree there, today for the first time I saw the bench. Maybe in part because I don’t drive past there much anymore, and maybe it had been moved there April 4th, I don’t know, but I had never seen it before.

That date, I found out later from the school’s website, was officially Albert Hopkins Memorial Day and that bench had been given to the school in his honor, inscribed with the words, “In Memory of Albert Hopkins. Live happy, love freely, seize the day.” On the website: “He gave, he listened, he encouraged.”

I couldn’t help but wonder if those two rogue cops might now have kids at that school where Albert showed each child who came into the Academic Center for help that their success was everything to him. He would have taken them in under his wing if they needed anything, anything.

Two blog posts. Do I post this one? (I’m not sure.)

I told the nurse that the cardiologist she works for is so soothing. But if you want me to come in about something, I told her, you have to worry me about it or I’ll blow it off: I’ve had lupus a long time. You get pretty blase’.

She chuckled and handed the phone straight to the doctor and let him deal with me directly. He did not worry me this time either, rather, he said that that kind of description you’d have to have narrowed arteries for it to be a heart attack.

Do I?

No.

Well then, it was a lupus hit-and-run and it’s over now, right?

He thought so. Added the usual, But come right in or call 911 if anything else…

Dude. If I’d been able to call 911 at 4 a.m.-ish Sunday rather than just living through it, I would have. Well maybe. As it was, I had decided I really did need to somehow wake Richard up to call after all–and immediately it let up. Poof.  Over. Lack of pain never felt so good. So I figured, stupid lupus inflammation, and went back to sleep.

“How are you feeling now?”

Fine! (Explaining the excitement in my voice) And I  just got a new grandson!

He chuckled. He’s so looking forward to that stage.

Or do I just post this one?

When I wrote about the Dancing Queen amaryllis the other day, I promptly got the ABBA song of that title stuck in my brain. It is safe to say I have never cared for that song.

I woke up in the morning and the darn thing was still playing in my head. There was only one escape: replace. I put Carlos Santana on first, a little bit louder than I intended to. You’ve got to change your evil ways! Baby!

Which is how I finally got myself to sit down with the latest yarn and start the knitting that I so much needed to do. Music is Pavlovian: I can’t have it playing and read, rather, it demands that I sit and absorb every sound I can, and I can’t just sit there (at least in my own house) without making something in my hands to the rhythm of the notes.

I ripped out the beginning four times but got past that and kept going, making this project up as I go along, something new, writing it down. Crossing that out. Tinking back. Getting it right.

I had been missing that compelling sense of purpose to the work that comes with a good project. It’s such a relief and a comfort to dive back in. I heart knitting.

They’re so good at not looking in the windows as they walk by, not intruding. (I imagine their job depends on it.)

We still have utility workers who come to read the meters once a month.

Mine has to walk past the birdfeeder.

It was a young guy this time, someone I hadn’t seen before, and as he walked studiously forward he couldn’t help but look up–and he cracked up.

Just a small slit in the bottom for the hanging chain to thread through; it’s been working perfectly for awhile now. The squirrels look down, they see the inside, and they know they can’t climb their way out of a paper bag.

(p.s. If you get a chance to see it: at 7:15 am California time, Glenn Stewart will be rappelling down to the nestbox area from the roof of San Jose City Hall and banding the three young peregrine falcons Tuesday, while their parents, who can dive at 241 mph, will be swooping at the guy’s hardhat-covered head. If you want to see it live, the cam feed is here.)

Richard and I went back to the audiologist this afternoon. (Last week he couldn’t get out of work.)

I reminded John that I got my first set of hearing aids at 27, all-in-the-ear types, and they fed back constantly. Constantly! Just turning my head so my hair moved would do it. I asked the audiologist there in New Hampshire if that could damage my hearing–I mean, loud noises from other sources can, right, so…? She flatly pronounced it a no. That made no sense to me.

And then we moved here and I got referred to John; I asked him the same question and his reaction had been to go, and I will never forget the words because I was so grateful for them, “Huh. Nobody’s ever asked me that before. I’m going to go to Stanford to find out.” And he took their audiology department my hearing charts old and new and came back to me and said, Yes, and you’re a classic case. You need to stop using those.

I had lost 15dB of my hearing permanently to them. So I know how important it is to avoid feedback, I finished, adding, and the new right one especially sometimes feeds back.

Yes, it is important, answered John, and took new impressions to make larger, tighter earmolds and hopefully that should solve it.

He and Richard chatted while I heard zero with that stuff plugging my ears.

John, taking the finished impressions out: So the new hearing aids really are helping?

Richard answered that when I got those first aids all those years ago, feedback aside, I was dumbfounded by the world of sound. I’d had no idea how much I’d lost. I stepped out my front door into a quiet morning and had no idea what on earth–oh! It was birds! You could hear birds without seeing the birds? Wow! And I would drop a pin, just to hear it hit the floor. You really could. Who knew. I was ecstatic.

Richard said, And it’s like that all over again. All the other times there have been new aids, it’s never made as much of a difference like it did then, but these do.

I told the guy about hearing the hawk, the jays, the dog I didn’t even know the neighbors had, the high-pitched squeal today as the automatic doors shut again and again at the post office, ear-splittingly loud–in all the twenty-six years of living here I had never known that was there. Wow.

John is a very even-keel kind of guy, but by this point the grin on his face burst into a “YES!” as he pumped a fist. Everything he had hoped for as much as I had, as we had not quite dared to hope. And there it is.

But there’s a little bit of holding our breath. The new type of mold is hard and it is frankly more prone to feeding back–but it is also partly responsible for my hearing so much better. It transmits sound better. If the bigger ones coming don’t fix the problem, I’ll have to go back to the soft type. We all so hope not.

We come back in two weeks when the new molds come in. But I said to Richard, huh. They’re squealing less since we left his office.

Maybe he jammed them in there harder than you do?

Or maybe at a different angle (bigger molds would take care of those variables.)

Still learning. Hoping hard.

Today we celebrate our oldest: Happy Birthday, Sam! It snowed that day; today there was so much wind that I wondered, looking up through a skylight, whether a limb or two on that big tree might come down. (It held.) A finch leaving my feeder suddenly got thrown far sideways in the gust but recovered and made it to the safety of the trees to ride out the worst with some of its flock.

My cousin Tina had kids visiting and they decided that maybe watching the marathon with three grandkids in tow under age four would not be the best idea after all and so they went to the JFK library instead, figuring they would have it all to themselves while everybody else was at the race.

Which they pretty much did.

They left at 2:40. By the time they got home it was clear they needed to turn on the TV…

Ezra Klein wrote a beautiful, moving tribute from the point of view of a marathoner’s husband celebrating the cheering crowds and the history and the runners and the rescuers here. I highly recommend it.

We had recall work and then, it turned out, major warranty stuff as well being done on our car, and there came a phone call saying that a rental car was covered with that warranty. The Prius was going to be staying there for a few days.

The dealership that used to drive me nuts, this afternoon, sales and service people alike on the floor wanted only to make life easier for every single person who walked in those doors. There was a genuineness, a quietly shared vulnerability, a need to reach out. Sit, sit, (while I waited for the rental to be delivered) may we…  I don’t drink coffee or tea, and they were keenly disappointed not to be able to give me that small gesture, wanting to be able to Do Something; I regret not having asked for a simple cup of water, for their sakes’ and my own.

Note all the runners and first responders and average people alike who ran TO the fire and the smoke in the bombings today, their need to help others instinctively and instantly more important than their very lives. That, that is who we are as Americans and as human beings and we will never forget those who by doing so ran against the force of the wind to rescue us all.

The audiologist wanted me to do a good comparison of the new vs the old aids, so yesterday I was back to a quieter world, but today I didn’t want to miss a thing. New it was.

The Relief Society (the women’s organization at church) lesson was just starting, and the woman picked up a red marker to write a point on the white board.

It took me so very much by surprise that I suddenly realized I’d said it out loud hopefully not too loud, “You can actually HEAR that?!” I knew from my childhood that chalks squeak, but dry erase markers?!

And then sank into my seat half covering my face like a little kid in class, silently going ohmygosh. I can’t believe I said that.

It enhances the embarrassment that I heard me better, too, as I said it.

So there was this California towhee. A brown bird about robin size. And it occasionally hops onto the outside of the sliding glass door and peers in the window: the carpet is bluer on the other side, or maybe it’s wishing it could take the house tour again. (That was so cool.)

And then it pecked at a few seeds that had fallen down in the runner.

I found myself staring in disbelief. I know you guys are going to get tired of hearing about all these firsts, but, my stars, all the times I’ve seen it do that and this time it had a sound! A loud sound! Tap. Tap. A hesitation, a hop, and then three more times tap, and it was about what I would have expected it to sound like if I’d had any such expectation. But it was a complete surprise. This after twenty-seven years of wearing hearing aids.

There are memories of sounds still in there. Sometimes over the years I’ve wondered if I heard something just then or if my brain just filled in what I would have heard had I still been able to. Beak on metal, though, that one now I know I know.

If you need to ask, you need to do it.

I’d done the hot water scouring to get the mill oils out of the silk baby afghan and the rinse water still had blue. Should be fine, thought I a few days ago, and laid it out to dry.

It bugged me. I finally said something to somebody, more to out myself than anything.

If you need to ask, you need to do it.

And so yesterday it was hot water rinse after hot water rinse and when I say hot water, I mean my husband left the setting on the new water heater higher than we’ve ever had it: I was putting that afghan in and then pushing it down into the water with something else so I wouldn’t burn my hands.

Finally, on the fifth time soaking (making seven in all), it came out clear enough to wonder if any blue effect left was just reflections across the water from the afghan itself. It felt okay, finally, so, done.

The afghan and its matching hat are a lighter blue than they were. And that’s fine.

Meantime, I called my mom today and it was not that much different really from the usual in terms of hearing her. Huh. A letdown.

Richard came home: “Oh good, you’re wearing the blue tooth.” (Second glance.) “But why don’t you have it turned on?”

Oh. Riiiiiight. Forgot that you don’t just take it off the charger in the morning like a cellphone, you have to turn it ON. Duhhhh.

And then I went off to knit night, where I heard one woman’s voice–and from across the noisy room–for the first time. Ever. Hadn’t realized I actually didn’t know what she sounded like.

Another woman, after I explained I had new hearing aids, went, “So that’s why you don’t sound deaf anymore.”

“I sounded deaf? I try really hard not to.”

And then she added, “I’m going to have to be careful what I say now,” and laughed a good one.

The phone rang: Were we all home? Would we like to Skype and see Hudson?

And how! It was a race for the monitor.

Big hands like his daddy, thick full black hair like his Uncle John had had at birth, oh so gorgeous like his mom. Beautiful. More pictures coming.

Which makes everything else sound so very trivial, but here goes: Michelle did buy the car yesterday, a Civic coupe, her father leaving work early to drive to Dublin with her for it. He came home going, wow, that was the most laid-back dealership I have ever seen, and I went, yes, isn’t it?

We all piled in after she got home from work tonight to admire it and check out little details we’d missed–oh, did you know it does this? Look at where all those airbags are, how big that trunk is. I wondered how I’d missed that it had a sunroof?

She started grinning and suddenly the consensus was, time for a joyride! Let’s go get chocolate! And so we not only did, we discovered a new dairy-free (do you know how hard it is to find those?) dark mint chocolate that was very good. Equal Exchange Chocolates. And Green and Black’s had taken her very favorite Maya Gold that they’d changed to dairy contaminated and in the latest shipment they’d taken the dairy back out again. She had checked every time she went to Whole Foods, where the allergics shop, hoping that hoping would somehow get them to change it back so she could enjoy them again. The packaging was a little different: could it be? (Reading the new label…) YES!!! There was a little dance in the chocolate aisle. Thank you Green and Blacks for celebrating with us!

And.

Today I was finally at the audiologist’s to try out the long-talked-about new hearing aids that had been about to come on the market and are finally out. For the last three months I’ve been afraid the whole idea was a fool’s errand and quite an expensive one;  four years ago I’d bought the very best and the very newest, the top of the line, and surely not much had changed in that short a time.

Then John Miles put the new ones in and fiddled with his equipment awhile.

And turned them on.

And the moment he started talking I nearly burst into tears. It was that different.

He asked for my cellphone and synced it to the new bluetooth and then asked for the number.

I heard it ring.

This doesn’t happen.

I heard it ring! From not right up against my ear and on speakerphone but down the counter from me in regular mode!

He walked out of the room and talked via my cellphone and his landline where the bluetooth-induced time lag wouldn’t be an echo problem. (All these things I’m learning that I never had to know about before because they just didn’t apply to me.) Again, listening, I was stunned.

He cautioned me that I would likely still have problems with women’s voices on the phone, higher pitches being a problem, and my reaction was that hey, compared to what I’ve had? Which on a cellphone is nothing? I love my Iphone but it’s been text only, and on a landline I couldn’t hear people who were talking into a cellphone.

He explained that there is a theory that you hear better if both ears are hearing at the same level, and so the two aids cannot be made individually louder or softer. No more turning down the ear next to Richard when he’s sitting next to me at our side-by-side monitors and calling towards Michelle in the kitchen. “I married the loudest man I could find,” I told John, and he managed not to die laughing on the floor but simply looked me in the eye with a suppressed impish grin as he answered, “Yes. Yes you did.” (Well, and he’s been married to me for a long time. This has not made him more soft spoken.)

So. Both ears at same volume and can’t change that. Tap the right one to make them both go louder, tap the left for quieter, or tap the volume on the bluetooth receiver necklace thingummy, which will pick up the cellphone from up to thirty feet away.

Tucking my hair behind my right ear somehow made it go louder a couple of times. I think. I don’t always hear the beep that signals the change, it depends on the ambient noise.

I cannot tell you the depth of the sense of reprieve it gives me to be hearing things that had been lost to me. They were gone from me forever and now they’re not.

By Federal law there’s a 30-day tryout period. But I am never ever going back.

I was asked, so to explain: I got put on antibiotics for a sinus infection and they’re clearing that up nicely, but I also had–well, norovirus really should be a yarn-related description, don’t you think? *cough* Mild flaring too. At the one week mark I figure I’m about halfway done with it all.

It rained last night, and this morning, together, both apple trees opened their first blossoms.

This makes me way too happy. There is a very new plum-cherry cross on the market, Dave Wilson’s Pluerry, not lab-induced but done by good old-fashioned years of field work, and it is supposed to be the top taste winner, period, across all their fruits. The catch is that it needs a plum tree for pollination. I of course have one–but in all the various microclimates around here, they don’t yet know which varieties other than Burgundy will work. I have a Santa Rosa. I’ll wait for now–but it tickles me beyond silliness that my apple trees show how it’s done, to the day.

Kathy, I finally snagged a shot of a chickadee with its beak full of your dog’s undercoat; there’s a bunch of it on the table just below that pot and he dove down in there awhile like a knitter at Rhinebeck, individual fibers flying as he searched out the best, then reappeared on top to show off his prize just before taking off.

And if my Plantskydd (when I get it) is successful, I may actually have to thin the plums.

I finally, for the first time in a week, picked up my baby blanket knitting today (it will be scoured in hot water) and at least made a try at getting it done in time. It felt so good to be working on that beautiful thing again in happy anticipation of our coming April baby.

The timing! The choreography of God.

When we moved into this house, there was a miniature rose bush in the furthest part of the backyard blooming profusely, exuberantly, but where nobody could see it from inside the house. It just quietly did its thing and you had to go look to see it.

About ten years ago, maybe more, a weed tree sprang up near it. But I like trees, I miss the deep green of our native Maryland and this asked no expensive watering of us, and so too late we realized we didn’t like how much it had multiplied via suckers and become a line of trees along the fenceline that dwarfed and darkened the air above the little rose.

Which stopped blooming at all or even, as far as I could tell, growing. It just kind of held its breath.

The neighbors recently took out most of those weed trees with our permission, as I’ve mentioned.

I went outside on this lovely Easter evening we were having to check on my fruit trees, and a flash of pink over to the right caught my eye. And a second. They hadn’t been there before.

It had gotten a second chance. It is reaching to the light and so becoming again all that a small rose bush lives to be.

I washed the windows yesterday while I was overdoing it–or at least the imprints of a few doves fleeing the hawk, which is most of what was needed. They were ghostly, beautiful, the dust and oil in each feather on the chests and on the foremost edges of their wings rendering the perfect film negative with the light shining through. So intricate.  So detailed.

And having them there was a little too… Poor doves. Their swift moment of suffering had allowed my beloved hawk to live. Time to clean.

I was talking to Michelle this afternoon when she said, “Oh, you missed it.” I turned around and in that time he came back: the hawk had landed on the edge of the box a few feet away and was standing there looking in at us.

Perhaps he had come to study those windows that stood halfway between us, making sure. Yes. The glass was still there. The missing imprints could no longer warn off his prey about the solid surface, like that dove that got away yesterday, and so there shall be feasting.  Well done.

Meantime, in San Jose, it looks like we will have two Easter chicks (eyases). Clara the peregrine happened to turn the first egg with a pip right to the camera, which promptly zoomed in and started recording as the egg tooth worked away at the beginning of what will be a perfect cut around the circumference. I thought it looked like a second pip on the egg next to it, and it was reported to be clearly working away too this evening.

New life arises. Wishing a Happy Easter to all who celebrate it.