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Riding horses, hanging out with friends, playing music, devouring good books, walking her dogs, playing in the yard with her parents. These days, Madison has the care and energy for them all.

Madison, a seventh-grader at Wy’east Middle School, leads a life as active as most kids her age. She enjoys devising relay races with her neighbors, or riding bikes or going on walks in her Leasure Drive neighborhood. She plays the clarinet in school band and this week she started piano lessons.

“Band,” she immediately answers when asked her favorite class in school. She decided to play bass clarinet since that’s what her mom, Debbie Hanna, played. She will move up to the instrument next year as an eighth-grader.

“I like the sound of the clarinet, and the look of the keys,” Madison said.

She also enjoys lunchtime chess and foosball competitions, and recently made it to the semifinals in the foosball tournament, but she and her partner lost.

“It was just as well because we would have had to forfeit because we had a band concert the next day,” Madison said.

She also plays marimba with the group Chigwaya. She attended the marimba festival ZimFest in Olympia, Wash., last summer and plans to go again this year.

“Some of the band stayed in a motel with a pool. It was great — going swimming with all the other kids in the band,” Madison said.

You can hear Madison and her Chigwaya mates play on March 8, at the HUGS Festival (Helping Us Grow Safely) at Henkle Middle School in White Salmon. The group, led by Karen Tauscher, performs from 10-11 a.m.

She likes the exercise she gets in playing marimba, percussion music in which musicians strike wooden keys using large mallets.

Vigorous exercise was something she had to choose pretty carefully up until July 2005. That was when she underwent a rare and delicate heart surgery known as Fontan’s, to improve blood flow to her organs.

Hood River News interviewed Madison a month after her surgery, and she had already experienced increased energy. At that time, bike riding was still a question, but she does so regularly now. She can’t always participate in PE, to avoid impacts to her torso, but she enjoys walking, hiking, and running

“I can go a mile faster, some of it running. I get a lot more hyper — I have more energy. I like being hyper with my friends,” Madison said. “I like to laugh at the things my friends say, and their expressions.” For her own part, “I say random things sometimes.”

As her father, Tod, put it in the Aug. 6, 2005, interview, the Fontan’s ventricle bypass surgery gave Madison “a whole new physiology.”

“The surgery changed where the blood goes and how it gets there.” As a result, her oxygen saturation levels have increased and with that, her energy and skin color. “She’s a lot pinker,” Debbie said.

But Madison is frank about her discomfort in dwelling on the Fontan’s.

“I tried to forget about it,” she said, but gamely responds when asked what advice she might give to other 10-year-olds facing major surgery.

“Your friends and family will be there and it will turn out all right. It’ll turn out a lot better,” she said.

Madison has moved on to the multi-faceted act of living.

“I’m able to do more things longer, like skiing and snowboarding in our yard, and hiking and horseback riding,” Madison said.

A few years ago the Hannas moved from a house near May Street Elementary to several acres on Leasure Road in Mt. Hood. She speaks fondly of playing Frisbee and baseball in the yard.

“I like it where we live. Our neighbors have four kids, and we make relay races and play Frisbee and go for bike rides and walks and walk the dogs.” The Hannas also have a rabbit, a cat, and sometimes raise baby chicks to give away.

Reading is one thing that has endured for Madison now that she is able to be more physically active. She is an avid Harry Potter fan; when interviewed in 2005 she had just picked up the fifth “Harry” book, finding the energy shortly after the surgery to go to the midnight book release party at Waucoma Bookstore.

She read the seventh and last Potter book last summer on the ride home from a trip to Michigan, after picking it up at a midnight party. She also brought along Potter books one through four, to start the cycle again.

Now that she has read, and re-read, all seven volumes Madison said that in 2007’s series finale author J.K. Rowling made “everything fit in well.”

“She did a great job of tying everything together,” said Madison, who is doing the same thing in her own life.