The Dancing Queen amaryllis, it blooms yet again. I think I’ve had this bulb about ten years now.

My mom reports that her recovery from her knee replacement surgery is going quite well. But then she is one patient for whom they never had to worry whether she would let pain get in the way of doing her range-of-motion exercises so scar tissue won’t set in and limit her later: if it needs to be done, my mom gets it done. There are walks waiting to be taken and flowers to see!

An angel food cake was baked.

Parker played and laughed and had a great time Skyping tonight, but singing Happy Birthday was just too over that gotta-be-shy-now edge. He was adorable. And any time we see each other across the monitors now there has to be some flashlight playing: it’s become part of the deal. You…light up myyy liiiiiife…

Hudson, meantime, yawned back at us from his daddy’s arms as if to show his brother how this singing thing is done, and waved his arms and legs and occasionally looked wide-eyed straight into the camera–one time with a smile. His due date was actually yesterday. He already looks so much older than last Monday.

And their parents looked so happy too.

Bliss.

What a long day.

It started with a phone call–and I heard the phone ring, without any aids in, as I stepped out of the shower, which is an exceedingly rare but turned out it was a needful thing–letting me know that our oldest had been in a car accident.  I grabbed my old aids quick, wet hair and all: a teenager with pedal to the metal had hit her car hard enough to spin her out into a parked car that then was thrown into another parked car.

This is our kid with the autoimmune hemophilia. But after some time in the ER, she’s home and recovering. Thank heavens for airbags and attentive doctors and her good friend who came to get her. It was the guilty teenager himself who called 911 for her.

Then three of my cousins and their families were locked down in the Boston area as the whole world prayed for everybody’s safety, hoping hard for a good outcome. The one with young children had them visiting her parents in New Hampshire, where they did not have to see.

And then, as I’m sure you already know, the surviving bomber was captured and taken by ambulance to the ER and nobody else was hurt and he didn’t die either and the crowds poured out of everywhere and lined the streets to cheer all those officers, all those agents, all those long hours they’d put in to protect everybody, facing down their fears for us all, and it was a finish line of celebrating, joyous fans after the kind of marathon that nobody should ever have to go through.

My sweet husband this morning, wanting to see a way to forgive, wondered out loud if, like the DC sniper case, we had someone young and impressionable in thrall to an older, more evil man, and perhaps he might still be malleable enough to be able to come to see what he’d done should he survive being found. There was no doubt in our minds that he would be found. We had sat through a neuropsychologist’s lecture, years ago, where the man had said that in our youth our brains are not fully myelinated, and that what that means is that we physically cannot draw the mental line from A to B to mean C will happen; “So if your kids act brain damaged, it’s because they are,” he only half joked. Around 20-22 for men, a little earlier for women, that is when one can begin to see the future impacts of one’s actions.

That lecture has made it easier ever since for us to understand and forgive anything a teenager might say or do.

The New York Times and the Boston Globe have already run profiles of the two bomber brothers suggesting that very dynamic between them.

A cop said to one of the reporters as the ambulance drove the guy to the hospital, There will be justice, not revenge.

And in those words he represented the best of America in the face of what was done to us.

(And to clarify after Kelli’s comment: yes, absolutely. He must be held accountable to the full extent of the law for his actions.)

There must be young ones needing feeding. I know the peregrine falcon eyases in San Jose have gotten big enough that their mother no longer has to brood them to keep them warm at night now but rather stands sentinel on the ledge above, as she has every year at this point. Day and night, she does most of the staying with her babies; her mate does most of the hunting and providing for all of them.

Susan sent the link to the bald eagle cam in downtown Washington DC near the Anacostia River. Cool!

Here, it may be that the brief intrusions of a raven the last few days making another try at extending its sphere enters in; I don’t know, but I saw the Cooper’s hawk swoop by yesterday and then again today.

And then again.

And then the tip of what had to be his tail as he disappeared in the time it took me to look up. And the same again.

And a few hours later he did a figure eight around the two poles supporting the awning, trying to flush out anyone in hiding; a blink or two after he was unsuccessful and out of sight, a finch, and then another, burst out of there for the safety of the trees but there suddenly he was again, bearing down fast.

I don’t know who won that round. I was wondering if he’d actually caught anything all day at that point, for all the energy he’d put into it.

I was starting to work on dinner and was coming and going from this room with the glass walls but happened to sit down a moment as finches fed above and two doves pecked away below. Pigeons and doves–those are what a large hawk really wants. Slow on the getaway and a large meal for the effort: you’ve been waiting for this all day, I thought towards Coopernicus, wherever he might be, it’s there now if you want it.

And as if answering my call, within seconds he was screaming in on that patio, down, down. A small burst of short dove-gray feathers, he looped back up around the nearer pole over the amaryllises and was gone as fast as he’d come.

And the Accipiter cooperii species continues its comeback.

This amaryllis is dedicated to the people in Boston. It’s supposed to have a good two feet of stem, but due to its exposure to red virus last year, wasn’t able to grow one. It refused to let that stop it from offering the blooming it was meant to give to the world.

Meantime, they caught the guy (and I’m sure that story will be updated by morning). He was arrested today and accused of sending ricin-laced and threatening letters: the President was sent one, as were five members of Congress, some of them hand-delivered, and what looked like a bomb was left at a Senate building entrance; thousands of staffers were locked down.

Those Congressmen’s peers still voted to make it so that, should this man get out of jail, on bail or for time served, he then can have access to any gun of any capacity he should so choose without submitting to a background check against his mental or criminal state. The Senate wasn’t even willing to say to Heller with you. (Paging Scalia.)

Wow.

But I thank those those worked so hard at identifying and stopping this guy so fast and I pray for all the other investigators needing the help, as well as for the wounded and those tending to them.

Of whom there are now more. My heart goes out to everybody in the town of West, Texas tonight.

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.

When the sun got quite low I went outside to trim back some remaining weed-tree branches to give the Fuji apple more sun; the doctor had told me I needed to work on upper-body strength (he wasn’t impressed when I mentioned the pound of baby afghan on my needles) and that was as useful a way to work on that as I could think of.

When I got out there, it was clear that the overall lack of rainfall this year was beginning to show in the plants.

A peach had dropped several leaves. A few of the little beginning plums were small and had turned yellow, unlike the growing green other ones;  the yellowing clivia leaves clinched it.

I glanced up just in time to see the hawk soaring overhead on his way by, as if he had launched from the top of the redwood across the property and had had enough of my intrusion into his hunting time. And I’d probably just messed with one of his hiding places–my apologies (but it needed to be done). I appreciated that he’d flown right above me where I would get to see him rather than where my view would have been blocked by the roof.

Back to work.

April is awfully early to have to water here, but oh well. With the new trees, it was a bigger space to cover than I used to have to do and they need a watchful eye as they get established. I got started.

I went back outside about every ten minutes to move the hose around.

It was about 8:20 and I was going to let it run for just a few more minutes over thataway when I suddenly leaped out of my chair muttering Ohmygoodness and turned on the porch light and then started across the room the other way.

What’s wrong? asked Richard as I said Ohmygoodness again at myself and went to turn on the bedroom lights, too.

Remember that possum that bared its teeth at me from ten feet away last year? It apparently has company.  We’ve had a few times in the last two weeks from an apparent distance, but…

Last night at about 11:00 the smell of skunk was sudden and intense. Now, skunk spray is great for opening up the airways for hours for asthmatics, but there are limits.

I actually–kids don’t try this at home–opened the sliding glass door, wondering if they’d been fighting in the shed.  I shut it fast: wherever the thing was, that spray was right there!

So here it was dark and I was about to go from the bright inside out to the pitch black with a nearly-gone moon to walk near that shed so I could move the hose. Thirsty, possibly pregnant or nursing nocturnal animals also would like hoses in the dark (they have bitten through them before) and would want a Do Not Disturb sign hung on them.

I made as much light as I could and maybe even a little noise and I looked all around as I went out there and shut that thing off. Sorry, plum tree, we are done for the day here, folks.

Besides, I didn’t have any marshmallows for them anyway.

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.

Walked out of the room while working on dinner, walked back in exactly as the hawk appeared behind the feeder, giving me a beautiful close-up view as a pair of finches freaked and took off.

And… More than the traditional bracelet (there was one, and Parker wanted one on his arm too in solidarity with his brother), the hospital had this monitor on Hudson: that baby wasn’t being taken anywhere by anybody he wasn’t supposed to while he was their patient. Alarms would have sounded.

Sounds quite sensible to me.

I wrote this, saved the draft, and walked outside to do my evening tour of the still-growing number of apple blossoms.

And heard, with the new hearing aids, surely nowhere near all of them, but here, and over there, and way over thataway far across the fence, all the birds with lower-pitched voices, and they weren’t crows…

I’ve heard descriptions for years now of peregrine parents in nesting season e-chupping at each other. I came in and played an online recording to be sure, and there it was–I now know what that sounds like in hawkspeak. I guess I really do have a pair out there, since they’re talking to each other. It had simply never occurred to me that I (or anybody) could know by hearing them. I heard the birds!!! My mind, it is blown.

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.

Seven pounds one and a half ounces, 19.5″ long, 2:51 pm, 10 days early, and the sweetest face on the planet. I just want to hold those wobbly new eyes in  mine.

And to tell Parker what a good job he’s doing of being the big brother.

I knitted the afghan working from two cones of silk at a time, four total.

Today I sat down to see if I could wrangle a baby hat out of the rest of the cone that had the slightly largest amount left. Single stranded instead of doubled, part because I wanted a finer fabric and part because there was so little yarn now. Eyeballing all the way,  hoping I was leaving enough for the decreasing at the top, checking Bev’s size chart, and yay, I made it!

Yeah I could rip out the last dozen rows to add another two of them to the main part. No I’m not going to. (No I did not snip it off yet, either. In case a new day gave me more patience.)

I wonder if I could squeeze a pair of baby booties out of the other near-empty cones. Because just one would look funny.