Day two at the post-op appointment: the nurse covered my left eye and asked how many fingers he was holding up.

All I could guess at was that he was standing in front of me. Pretty sure. I mean, his voice was, so…

Day three, at lunch today I took the patch off to put drops in. I looked at the mirror. Hey! I could tell where the mirror was and where my reflection was, even if I couldn’t have told you for sure it was mine or even a person except that, well, duh, context and all that. But still. What a difference! We’re up to lava lamp vision.

Three hours later I was sitting knitting. Mostly with my right eye closed because it was such a distraction.

Something caught my attention and I stopped. Closed my left eye. Looked at the afghan in my lap through all the little holes in the eye patch, and I imagine that helped with the focus?

But I did: I saw the brown trunk of the tree. Where it split off into three parts, the limbs climbing up from there–it wasn’t sharp but I saw it! With my operated on eye! I couldn’t make out the peach stitches nor the leaves at all, just that I could see the darker-ness of the limbs against–whatever was where.

I had to go back after dinner to do it again to convince myself I really had seen the form of the tree.

And because, having gotten this short small taste of what real blindness can be like, I wanted to celebrate all over again that it had changed so much so fast.