One day I was walking along a beach. It was an icy cold, windy day which meant that the wind whistled in my hearing aid making an unbelievable racquet. I took my hearing aid out so my world should then have been completely silent.
But it wasn’t.
I could still hear this angry wind hurling the sand against my legs as I walked. I could  hear the massive waves pounding their foam onto the helpless beach. I could hear the seagulls fighting among themselves over a piece of fish and their loud rasping cries as they took to the air.
My world was still alive with sound.
How? Did I suddenly get my hearing back? Soft laugh. No, my world was inhabited by sound because of my memory. This memory painted in for me all of the sounds I should have been hearing.
I thank God for this memory. I am grateful to be a person that once heard. I know sound.
I lie in bed at night, my hearing aid out and I watch a storm taking place outside. The low growl of thunder that I can now feel vibrating in my chest. The lightening streaking across the sky. The trees bent low with wind. The rain hurling it’s drops against my window pane. I know all the sounds that are being made. Because I was once a hearing person.
This friend of mine who has been deaf from birth said that she would far rather be as she is. She is perfectly happy; she is missing nothing. I thought about that. And disagreed. She will never know one of the best sounds on this earth: Lying snugly in bed and listening to the soft fall of rain on the roof. It is a sound that I have never been able to re-capture, even with my Cochlear Implant. It is a sound that I loved and I am so thankful for my memory of that sound.
Soft rain whispering down on a roof…….