Seeds of Disquiet: One Deaf Woman’s Experience

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----21Fred and I found a tiny ground-floor apartment that allowed pets. We'd decided to rent for a while, even though we were living in cramped quarters, because we wanted to get to know the Reston area before we invested in another home. We'd lived in the modular house for several months while we completed work on it. Once again we were caught between houses, closing on the modular two weeks before our apartment was ready. Fortunately, this time we had the cabin to fall back on. We moved everything we could out there and commuted to our jobs for a few hectic days. I had several bad nights during the seven months we lived in the Reston apartment. Our bedroom faced a parking lot, and there were a number of residents who kept a vigorous night life. Strong beams from the headlights on cars returning late at night or leaving early in the morning kept penetrating our venetian blinds. The flood of light would register on my slumbering brain, and I'd wake up, adrenalin pumping madly, expecting to confront a roaring fire. I had always had a problem with my sensitivity to light. I knew lots of kids who were afraid of the dark. Unlike those kids, I was unable to sleep with a light on. If someone forgot to tum the light off in the hallway, I'd wake up and be unable to 170 Seeds of Disquiet sleep again until I'd flipped the switch. When I traveled, it had become a ritual to block every light source before settling for the night. The lighted display on a videocassette recorder or luminous numbers on an alarm clock were enough to keep me tossing restlessly. Our tolerance for the apartment ran out quickly. Fred and I were falling over each other and the dogs from the first day. I used a comer of the tiny kitchen for my office, and Fred put his desk in the bedroom. For the first time in fifteen years, we had to share a bathroom, and we quickly remembered why we stopped doing so in the first place. Fred had switched careers again. He'd obtained his real estate license but opted to start working as a home inspector. It was a great match for the skills he'd developed over the years and ideal for someone who hated paperwork but loved to be with people. One of the added attractions was in meeting other home inspectors. The profession seemed to attract lots of eccentrics . Fred was meeting people from a wide range of backgrounds from architecture to construction, but all tended to be mavericks with wide-ranging intelligence. Through his contacts in the real estate business, Fred found a townhouse about a mile from our apartment. We were happy to stretch out again, get our furniture out of storage, and let the dogs out into a fenced backyard. The townhouse also had three bathrooms, with room for a fourth. I had moved so many times during the past five years that I was becoming conscious of how much adaptation my deafness required in new surroundings. I had a vintner's nose, despite the fact that it had been broken and battered many times since I was thirteen. I noticed new and unusual smells, and my brain was ready to switch to red alert whenever my nose recognized something burning. Once, when Fred and I were on vacation in San Francisco, I had smelled smoke while watching television in our hotel room. The two of us checked up and down the hall but saw 171 Seeds of Disquiet nothing amiss. Still, I was certain I smelled something burning. I insisted that Fred call the front desk to report the odor. The concierge thanked us politely for the call and told us that the restaurant's cook had accidentally charred one of his creations. He lied, but my nose didn't. The next morning's newspaper reported that a fire had broken out in a storage room several floors below. When a teakettle or a pot came to a boil, I could tell by sensing the vibrations if I touched the handle. I felt the water as it bubbled and rolled. My sense of touch was often the one requiring the most attention in my new house. I was perplexed for several weeks by a sort of 'ka-thud...