I can’t see clearly now (the rain is gone)*

I remember the day, decades ago, when I placed someone’s glasses on my face and saw individually outlined leaves on a tree in the back yard. I hadn’t known I wasn’t seeing clearly.

I can see perfectly now without contacts or glasses but only to read. I’ve spent the last year squinting into the distance, covering one eye and then the next, wondering why I can’t see. It’s made me crabby. I struggle to see my computer screen at work.

My eye doctor has me wearing one contact lens for distances and one for up-close and supposedly my brain will compensate and somehow I will see both near and far.

Nobody told my brain, though. In the distance, I see blurs. Up close, I am squinting and letters float together in a haze. I can’t see here and I can’t see there.

Contacts and glasses used to do the trick. I could see the horizon, across the room and letters in a book. Now I hold a prescription bottle and look hopelessly at the words. There’s no possible way I can read small print unless I have naked eyeballs.

I have to choose. I can either see far away, or across the room or . . . without any correction, twelve inches away.

This feels like life, somehow. I have no clear vision. I don’t see what’s in the distance. I can’t scan the room. If I am blind to everything else, I can read.

Vision for me, was one of those things I took for granted, not ever thinking this day of blurriness would come.

(My new eye doctor, by the way, is convinced he can help but I am convinced that I will soon be wearing contact lenses and “readers” . . . it’s not going to be possible to correct my vision so I can see everything all at once. And I cannot stand the blurriness at the edges–especially when I drive or look at a computer.)

*It’s been a very rainy winter here in San Diego and I have been embittered by the lack of sunshine. But now, today, the sun is shining. The rain is gone.