By Jerad J. D. Rider
Many think of winter as a big endurance test, and once its end is drawing near they hold fast to the comfort that its bleakness will be left behind and move on to a spring rebirth that offers new beginnings: all the trees obtaining leaves as green adorns their branches; the different grays from cloudy skies becoming optimistic blues that say the worst is over; the rain replacing sleet and snow and partnering with thunderstorms whose rumbles from the sky are peaceful background noise; the bluebirds and the finches and the robins singing merry songs; all the creatures hibernating waking up to relish life; then the frozen Earth herself a thawing evolution, engaging warmth’s gigantic hug where everything is right as rain because it isn’t winter. The plants and flowers grow! Don’t forget the pretty kinds you see throughout Ohio: the blue false indigo, the yellow marsh marigold, and then my favorite one–the purple wild geranium. Their vivid colors paint the Earth just like a gifted artist, like Bob Ross’s landscape art when nature comes alive on a previously-blank canvas. When, as he put it, “the happy little clouds” and “happy little trees” remind us why we love them. Yes, indeed, they do. Yet with the entrance of spring comes the entrance of what? Sounds. Yep. That, too. Lots of daily sounds. A new acoustic wonderland. The everyman and everywoman may enjoy such stimuli, but noxacusis people don’t. Quite the opposite.
Nature brings in sound and so does man’s technology. Neighbors go outside and play their favorite sports. Basketball is popular and makes a lot of noise, like the dribbling orange ball, the backboard smacking sound when players try to make a shot and then the ball collides with it, and then the steel net, singing with its loud victorious rattling when players sink a shot. And then, of course, the players howl, happy that the ball went in.
Neighbors remodel their houses too and hammers smack for endless hours. They have outside parties or get-togethers, using their hot tubs while chatting loudly or playing music, even at night. But hands down, the worst thing they do is cut grass. Constantly cut grass.
In T.S. Eliot’s poem called The Waste Land, he wrote that “April is the cruellest month.” Well isn’t that the truth? I can relate (even to the title; my home becomes a waste land): the whiplash of having a peaceful winter evolve into a spring hell. For the average person with healthy ears, spring is beautiful. Life becomes alive. For me, it is the opposite: horror, worse imprisonment, and feeling like a fearsome foe is banging on the walls, trying its damnedest to enter my house and hurt me. In truth, that’s what I deal with. My three conditions see to that, all severe in symptoms: noxacusis, loudness hyperacusis, and reactive tinnitus.
I’m homebound and haven’t left home in three years (last time I did, I permanently worsened from everyday sounds, even with earplugs and earmuffs), but spring is devastating. I used to love it; now I don’t. The reason is simple: my house goes from hospitable to inhospitable once the season hits, especially in April. April is indeed the cruellest month, because grass season starts and grass season is both a physical and mental torturer for someone with severe noxacusis. It becomes a nonstop cycle when people start clinging to their mowers like a needy lover does their partner. It becomes obsession, making sure their grass is cut and never grows a quarter inch beyond its perfect height.
In Powell, Ohio, my house is in suburbia. So within earshot, I have about 100 homes or so I have to contend with grass-cutting-wise. If you do the math, gauging the seven days a week, that means there’s someone always cutting. Always. It’s like those conveyer belts you see in factories, neverending. Even at 7:30 on a weekday morning. Never fails. And sometimes people have the nerve to crash a weekend morning, too, prior to 9 A.M. when people are trying to sleep in. Kind of selfish, isn’t it?
One neighbor cuts his two-acre lawn with his obnoxious gas-powered John Deere tractor every three or four days. In the last 11 days, he has mowed for over eight hours, four times. I swear it’s somehow true. I don’t know how it is (God help him), but yes, it is for real.
Other people cut, too. As I said, it’s constant, and their routines I’m privy to; when sounds become a threat, you pick up on their habits.
For example, every five days, another neighbor cuts his one-acre patch with his not-quite-as-painful lawn mower (compared to that obnoxious tractor). Yes, that’s the right word: painful. For my ears, even with earplugs and earmuffs on, the sensations vary from deep stabs and acid burns to heavy grinding against their innards. Instant pain, not delayed. The type that puts you down, not what you can power through. Anyone who’s cutting from a quarter-mile distance brings me to my knees, and yet they’re unaware they’re causing such a nightmare. In anger and shock, I often ask myself how that’s possible. (A quarter-mile distance?!?! How can that be real?) But that’s of futile relevance, a pointless coping strategy that doesn’t change a thing. It doesn’t matter why it comes or how it’s possible, or how unfair this is to me. The pain comes nonetheless, and that’s what matters, isn’t it? That I’m a tied-up/tortured slave to its destructive might; that when I don’t obey, I permanently worsen. Yes, that’s what’s important: obeying its decree.
My loudness hyperacusis makes the low-frequency oscillating mowers deafening. My tinnitus rises and spikes for days. Slowly it has been worsening over the years and sometimes I wonder if it’s due to all these cutters, and that maybe they’re also inhibiting my ability to improve my noxacusis with time and silence. Of course its not these people’s fault, but . . . maybe . . . isn’t it ridiculous? (The ones who cut so frequently to kill a quarter inch?) It’s bad luck a noxacusis person wound up next to neighbors gaga over their grass.
On average grass can grow about an inch a week (Heartland Turf & Landscape, 2025). Cutting every three to five days is major overkill (obsession, certainly), as it only cuts a quarter inch, maybe half an inch (we’re talking eensy weensy). And overdoing it is bad for the grass’s health, breaking down its blades and making them and the soil beneath more likely to get diseases and pests and sun abuse (Daleys Turf, 2017). The irony, of course, is that obsessions often foster undesired outcomes, yet for these determined people, it’s about the look of having that perfectly-manicured lawn. That’s more important than the grass’s and soil’s health. More important than logic, too. Feeding the compulsion comes first. (Do it! Do it! Do it! It’s time to cut! Do it! the little voices say.) They have to feed the urge. And when you watch these cutters slice their grass that grew a quarter inch, sometimes it’s as if the world’s lost its mind. You question what they’re thinking. The money for the gas, down the toilet. The time put into it. The attachment to an idol. (Do it! Do it! Do it!)
For the noxacusis sufferer, the most important things concern avoiding pain, setbacks from exposures, or the worst thing possible: a worsening that’s permanent, that even after several weeks, doesn’t go away. It’s crucial to have control of sound. For some that’s hard to do when all the mowers fire up. Like me. I’m constantly moving from one side of my house into the other side to try to dodge the onslaught of incoming mowing sounds. Sometimes I can’t avoid the pain and have to suffer physically. And even if I can avoid it, hiding in the upstairs windowless bathroom for hours and hours is mental torture. It has been so bad lately that I want to move. I don’t like my house anymore. Its transition from winter to spring reminds me of those exoplanets deep in outer space whose habitats go from one extreme to the other due to tilted orbits or complex orbital cycles, whose climates range from great to terrifying, sometimes with temperature fluctuations of 1,000+ degrees.
In the last week alone, I’ve had to hide in that tiny bathroom for 9 total hours to evade cutters. I’ve lost countless time for work because I can’t focus or use my computer up there. Sadly, my account is a morbid peek into the worst of these conditions . . . what folks like me are battling. This is what we deal with. Our life is sound avoidance. Lying low and never having freedom, since sound is everywhere. Our mission is to hunker down, not be part of nature. Nature is against us, since sound is woven into it. Sound is nature’s partner. You can’t have one without the other. So we hunker down. Not because we want to–hell no! Not that! We do it to survive, as it’s about necessity. Not obeying its decree will worsen our conditions.
Noxacusis is the anti-life condition. The antithesis of living. That’s why its sufferers lament, because they’re truly trapped when symptoms are severe. They’re prisoners in torture cells, and without treatments doomed to live that way. More often than not, there’s no parole in Noxacusis Land, and escaping is about as common as those real prison breaks. Sometimes people crawl through smelly, sh*t-filled sewer pipes, just as Andy did when fleeing Shawshank State Prison, although it’s rare, that’s the thing, and why we need some treatments.
In the meantime, I’ll have to move (and force myself to worsen if I do, since last time I did in 2022) or keep enduring sound-related beatings. It’s a no-win situation. Either way, I lose.
At the time of this writing, spring is three weeks in–21 days, to be exact–and yes, I’m hating it. Hating it galore.
*AI (Artificial Intelligence) wasn’t used to write or edit this story.
REFERENCES
[1]. The Connection Between Lawn Fertilization & Grass Growth Rate. Heartland Turf & Landscape. 2025. https://www.heartlandturf.com/blog/the-connection-between-lawn-fertilization-grass-growth-rate#:~:text=In%20well%2Dfertilized%20soil%2C%20most%20grass%20species%20will,inch%20if%20the%20soil%20meets%20ideal%20conditions.
[2]. What happens when you mow your lawn too often. Daleys Turf. 2017. https://www.daleysturf.com.au/what-happens-when-you-mow-your-lawn-too-often/.
Great descriptions! You are awesome writer! Sadly I know it is all true and so painful for you and everyone with this terrible thing- noxacusis. I pray daily for all of you, some great day you will tell us they have found a cure!
It is sooo bad for me too. I have a symphony of hell here with mowing, trimming and the horrid leaf blowers for grass debris. Spring has been a reminder of the continuous torture of sound. Soon the window air conditioner will be needed and the sound of it sends me to the other end of my apartment to cool what little bit I can tolerate. I cried last week when the apartment complex mega mowers started the season. They are in front and back at the same time. Ugh. I tried ear plugs and was freaked out when my hearing was so muffled I thought I was deaf. 12 yrs of hiding indoors for me. It doesn’t work the sounds from far away mowers is like right outside window. I miss life with hopes and plans slot. Despair is what we are forced to navigate. Thanks for putting it in words. What can be done? It is nothing but suffering. -Janis St. Mary’s, OH
The Mowers. The bringers of regular Hell to anyone with these afflictions. Forgive them, Lord, for they know not what they do.
Yesterday The Mowers, those suburban terrorists, nearly ended our friend here… thinking they were doing God’s work in caring for the church yard.
God made the grass perfectly. Let it go…the way it was meant to live…. suburbanites, please find another soothing hobby besides pointless, incessant, loud, harmful, plant trimming.
JD….I feel and know what you go through. I get even more despondent when Spring arrives. The winter is quiet and I can relax in my home more. I feel like I am being attacked by sound! I guess because in reality I am! I hate the confinement and isolation. I hate having to “hunker down.” My husband actually has a chair and table fixed for me in our upstairs bedroom closet when sound gets too much !!! We have double pained windows as well! Crazy huh!!??? We recently had Magnatite windows installed in the living room and our bedroom, which is an improvement. Imagine triple pained windows!! I remember when we moved into our home long before this hearing disaster. We had the original sash windows! Never gave these sounds a thought! So sorry you go through this hell. It is a nightmare you never wake from.
My neighbours aren’t that bad here in UK but I live next to a big cemetery and there’s a huge mower running several times a week all through the warm season… it’s the price I pay for a nice open view from my window, which ironically, does help me feel less confined… you can’t win.
For whatever it’s worth, when trying to soundproof, thickness or depth of the barrier is more important than material(density).
I.e. a 10 foot thick wall of styrofoam is more effective than a half inch of lead.
From my own quest to quiet my ‘hermitage’.
I used straw bales to build a sound wall outside my bedroom & it was effective but a fire risk.
Black plastic sheeting kept it from rotting & a bit less ugly but have to be vigilant for rodents.
Aloha friends 🤙
I also have hyperacusis and have had it for 15 years. I’m just wondering if you have checked for things like Lyme disease, Bartonella, SIH, or a CSF leak venous fistula? All of these can cause hyperacusis. The CSF venous fistula can be VERY hard to find as well, and was only discovered in 2014. Perhaps check out https://spinalcsfleak.org/directory/ ?
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