It is late and once again I cannot sleep. I went to bed about an hour ago, but realized I was not going to go to sleep right away. I sat up, on the edge of the bed, and gazed out the window into the night. We are on the third floor of our apartment building, above the street and traffic below. The lights of cars sweep by, lighting up the trees on either side of the road, causing shadows to dart around our room, before darkness descends again. This time of night, however, the road is mostly empty, dark and quiet.
Across the road is a business of some kind – I’ve never figured out exactly what it is. People come and go all day long, but I’ve never crossed the road to read the little sign on the gatepost directly across from our window and three floors down that tells the world what goes on in there. A light shines in one of the windows every night, all night long. Sometimes two windows have lights. It is a one story building, so the lights do not reach up this high to bother us in our darkened room.
Tonight as I sat on the edge of the bed, looking out the window, I was reminded of the many times during my childhood when I did the same. There are four of us girls in my family and I am the oldest. We shared one room – two sets of bunk beds. For a long time my position of being eldest gave me the privilege of having the top bunk on the north side of the room. My mother had made café curtains out of pretty, pale pink cotton gingham – an upper valance and two shorter curtains below that were drawn together at night. From my top bunk, though, I had a clear view beneath the valance of the night time world. I guess I have often had a hard time sleeping, because I can remember lying there at night, listening to my sisters’ little sleep-noises, looking out the window at the stars, or a few years later, at the brightly lit K-Mart sign a couple miles down the hill from us. I enjoyed doing this because I could see nothing clearly without my glasses on.
I have had severe myopia since birth, I guess. I remember the first time I wore a pair of glasses. I was in second grade. We came out of the building where my ophthalmologist had his office, a building which was located on Pikes Peak Avenue, just down the street from the old Antlers Hotel. The first things I saw were the twin peaks of the roof on the Antlers Hotel. The second thing I saw, for the very first time, were leaves on the trees. I was amazed, I had not realized that people could actually see individual leaves on the trees. I am still amazed when I look at trees.
But at night, I would take off my glasses and gaze into the darkness at the lights around our neighborhood. Porch lights, street lights, all balls of fuzzy light, sometimes overlapping each other, usually soft yellow. The K-Mart sign, however, was unique because it was a bright red fuzzy ball of light, attached to a smaller brilliant blue fuzzy ball of light. I would stare intently at a light until my eyes began to water. And then the most amazing thing would happen. I would see little shadows float across the balls of light. Some of the shadows were round, some were long and wavy, others looked like pictures of bacteria I had seen in a book. One time I asked my mother what I was seeing and she thought maybe it was dust floating in the tears. Because I was so near sighted, I could focus on it and see it clearly while everything else around it was fuzzy.
Yes, looking at the dust floating around in my tears, through the light of streetlights and the K-Mart sign was fun. I never knew for sure what I was going to see – and the lights were so pretty all fuzzy like that!
Tonight as I gazed out the window, contacts resting securely in their case on the table beside the bed, I was reminded of those nights long ago. Now there is a change, however. No longer do I see the little bits of dust in my tears. I realized for the first time tonight that with my left eye I see dim fuzzy balls of light. I wonder – are they dim because of the cataract I have in that eye? With the right eye I see fuzzy rings of light, with beautiful bright lacey webs within the ring when the light I am looking at is very bright. But when the light is dim, like that coming from the window across the street, I see a fuzzy ring and a darker hole in the center. This is due to the tear in the macula I had several years ago. Although experimental emergency surgery kept me from losing all of the vision in my right eye, it has no “center” vision and is truly “legally blind.”
So, I sat for awhile on the edge of the bed, listening to Mel sleep as I listened to my sisters so many years ago, scratching Cheyenne under the chin, staring at the lights across the street. First with the left eye, then with the right. Comparing the vision in each separately, and then with both eyes open.
I like the right eye view best – it’s the brightest and prettiest, even if it is not complete. But I miss the dust specks. I wish I could see them again….
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