Yarmouth, MA via Alaska to Find a Hearing Aid by Richard Browne

August 5, 2025: Yesterday afternoon my home phone rang and the number showed up on my TV. 907 is an Alaska area code, I had to find out about the caller and answered the call. As the call started about a loss and need for help, I was ready to pack and head for Alaska. I had been in Alaska back in the 1980’s and enjoyed every day there. The call went on about Kenneth’s mother, Virginia, loosing a hearing aid while doing some yard work. Though I was not lucky enough to have to go to search in Alaska, but rather in my town of Yarmouth, MA.

So far this year I have a 100% success rate for finding lost hearing aids – two of them. For now, after the phone call I would call Virginia in the morning and arrange to search for the hearing aid that would spend the evening in the garden. OK, all set 9:30am and the search will begin. Virginia, a bit older than I am but really sharp and very interesting to talk with from her life in Alaska working on the pipe line, sky diving with her grandson on his 16th birthday wish of her grandson, getting caught overnight between two avalanches, and to a more mundane life style of being a volunteer librarian who has now has lost two hearing aids. Virginia found the first in a evening’s rainstorm just outside her car and not inside the library where she thought it had been lost. Good news, it still worked and she had not stepped on it.

Now it was my turn to search for a hearing aid after her best try the day before did not turn it up. I started the area search with a 7” coil on my detector, I should have put the 4” coil on at it would have got into areas that the 7” one would not fit into. Not to worry, my handheld pin-pointer could cover all the smaller areas I could not reach otherwise. I started searching the ground and moved upward onto one of the climbing plants. Maybe the hearing aid had been caught on a branch. No, back to the ground and after three other metal objects, I had a signal that turned out to be caused by the close proximity of a metal object, in this case the minuscule battery of a hearing aid.

Virginia was nearby and was over whelmed by my success. The hearing aid survived the night in the garden and now ready to help Virginia hear her granddaughter’s speech more clearly. It was the granddaughter’s questioning of her grandmother “Why do you always ask me to repeat myself?” that prompted Virginia’s son, Kenneth, to arrange a hearing test that ultimately lead to Virginia’s use of hearing aids, especially when with her granddaughter. Little devices that can really help the quality of life of everyone around as well as the wearer of the hearing aids can remedy the need to request someone to repeat themselves. I also wear them and can relate. Going back I can remember my grandmother’s hearing aid, a little box that hung on her chest, had a wire going to her ear and made horrible squeals. No matter, GRANDMOTHERS are the best!