Last night TheWeeOne and I went to a movie. We didn’t speak on the way home – it was late.
Pulling into the driveway, the engine stopped, and we rested briefly in the quiet. My ears hissed and echoed the freeway speeds like a small shell on the beach.
I said,
It’s so quiet here
She nodded and I filled the space again.
But, I guess I hear like, a hissing noise in my ears.
She gestured with her chin out the window wordlessly, paused for effect, and said
Silence has lots of sounds.
blief 
One blessing of having hearing aids is being able to hear the sound of rain on the windows, of bird songs and frogs singing, of my own breath. Another thing to be grateful for is the ability to shut off the sound of the busy highway, the pervasiveness of the annual locusts and to enjoy total silence by the simple expedient of removing the devices from my ears.
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Aunt Hazel,
Do you “hear” sounds when devices are out of your ears?
Does your brain fill the void? (compensation?) or can you hear your heartbeat/breathing/neck-creaking – like I might in an isolated quiet place?
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“Hello darkness my old friend I’ve come to talk with you again…..”
Echoes in the sounds of silence….
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When I take out my hearing aids I can sometimes hear distant sounds better, because there is no interference by closer sounds, like my hair brushing my ears right beside the microphones. I can hear the rasping raucous scraping noise of the locusts as well as the rhythmic repetitions of the tree frogs calling to each other with hormonal urgency. The Cardinals’ loud, sweet songs are most evident at dawn and at dusk. They are much too loud to appreciate with hearing aids installed!
Similarly, when I take off the glasses that I have worn all day and close my eyes for sleep, I see negative images “on the inside of my closed lids” and the images shrink and swell and rotate slowly clockwise. I try to stop the rotation and make it turn the other direction, and I fall asleep within seconds. If I have been reading, my thoughts continue the narrative and really bizarre things frequently occur in the version that my subconscious mind “reads” on the inside of my head. Sometimes I am aware that I am dreaming and I wake up; more often I wander through my dream asking the dream characters, “AmI awake or am I asleep and dreaming?” They never answer. The saddest dreams are when my brother Bob is there and I want to speak to him but he fades away without speaking. I wake up and cry.
More information than you asked for.
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