Good Morning.
We call it Independence Day or, more commonly, the Fourth of July because it's still a holiday we don't move around to effect a three-day weekend as we do with Memorial Day and Washington's and Lincoln's birthdays. My husband thought what we did to those presidents was absolutely scandalous because he regarded a birthday, any person's birthday, as a private holiday that should be celebrated with all the stops pulled out. In any case the Fourth is the noisiest day of the year, one that is embraced by some creatures and dreaded by others, including most animals. My dog, a hunting breed who should have a tolerance for noise in her DNA, starts hiding the minute the first firecracker is set off three blocks away. I know of one gentleman who stays inside with the TV at full throttle because the pop, pop, pop stirs up memories of terrible times in Vietnam. I like the look of the public displays with their explosive grand finales but not the sound.
They say everyone has one sense that is keener than others and mine is my hearing. I would not make a good wine or tea taster. I love the smell of lilacs in the spring but I'd never be able to create a perfume. I've worn glasses since the age of ten when my lack of enthusiasm for math was attributed, incorrectly, to my inability to see figures on the blackboard. I do, however, appreciate wonderful pieces of art and the comings and goings of the sun.
I am acutely sensitive to sound. People digging around in bags of popcorn at the movies drive me bonkers. I hear everything at night from the dog scratching the rug next to the bed to a dripping faucet in the kitchen. I have restrained myself from lunging across the room because a woman is galloping her fingernails on a table. People coughing at a concert or in church have made me pray for divine guidance, particularly when they're unwrapping a cough drop, a process that is often agonizingly prolonged.
Other sounds don't bother me at all. The splatter of raindrops is magical, the dog slurping her water is delightful, and clothes bouncing around in a dryer is comforting. I wake up in a split second if a woodpecker greets the day by poking at a telephone pole but find it charming and bucolic. I never object to birdsong whether it comes from a mourning dove or a rooster. I was raised on all kinds of music, naturally bestowed and composed with a pen.
Getting used to my husband's sounds after we'd settled in together was interesting, however. He jiggled his car keys, squeaked around in his desk chair, and whisked eggs for an omelet at the velocity of a hummingbird flapping its wings. He kept the TV loud enough to be heard on either coast because his best sense wasn't his hearing, it was probably his sight even though he wore glasses for reading. He maintained everything he owned much more carefully than I did. He folded his golf shirts perfectly and stacked them with precision on a shelf in the closet. His dress shirts were hung neatly, the ties arranged according to color, and the slacks lined up from casual to formal. Most of his shoes were protected by bags and stored on the shelves. I usually had to hunt for some form of footwear that might be sitting under a table in the living room or beneath the clothes that had somehow slipped off their hangers onto the floor. He maintained his dresser much more fastidiously although the dish on top where he kept his loose change also contained dog biscuits. I cleaned out my chest of drawers maybe once a year and often discovered a scarf I'd been looking for was sitting in the folds of a nightgown, along with an earring whose mate was probably in the cup holder of my car. His sock drawer was immaculate; mine was a jumble of cardboard and wadded up hosiery. He also cultivated gardens worthy of a magazine shoot but was not a fan of orange. After the only fight we ever had, he sent me a dozen roses but they were orange.
As his illness increasingly took him into a downward spiral, the chair squeaks and kitchen techniques became my favorite sounds on earth, and I have, I think, developed more tolerance and maybe even a sense of humor about galloping fingernails and even the slow extraction of a lozenge from its wrapper. They represent life in all of its noisiness.
Best regards,
Elisabeth
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