When I was a kid there were some shows on TV that had, across the bottom of the screen, the lyrics to the music being played, with a dark little ball bouncing off each word as it conveyer-belted away off the screen in a single line with the next ones incoming. As an adult I assume that was to help kids learn to associate the sounds with the letters and help them start to read.

I’ve got the little (smaller than yesterday!) bouncing–well, more like wobbling–dark ball at the bottom. But my eyeball just doesn’t have the built-in captions to match. Someone ought to get on that. I mean, this is Silicon Valley and all that, right?

Saw the cataract surgeon today; he took a good look around and was quite pleased with how well all of it was healing.

I had one last burning question: when was I going to be able to wash my hair.

Don’t let any soap in your eye whatsoever and then the answer is whenever you want to.

You know those times when you can’t shout YAYYY!!! at the top of your voice while jumping up and down like a maniac because you’re expected to act like a grownup?

The rolled-up towel against my back to keep me from rolling over at night, the little bit of eye pain, the no exercise/no bending over/no lifting over five pounds, the waiting for my vision as it sneaks back into view slowly–I think emotionally it all kind of summed itself up simply in Man, I just badly want to be able to clean my hair.

It actually pulled off a surprisingly not bad job of faking it in the meantime. I was surprised.

I finally finished the last peach tree. Now to finish the top and the border.

I kept squinting at the thing in the sunlight today, staring at the colors I was never able to see completely accurately during all these months: not crisp yet, but cleared out. Cataracts add yellow to everything, and I’d say gray, too. So with the one cataract out, the retina part has months of healing time left but I think I can see now how bright that green actually is and at long last that yes, it really does go well with that blue. It always did.

I did better than I thought I did.

Wonderful talks, wonderful people, loved the guy from Louisiana talking about his momma’s home cooking and how adding that metaphorical good dose of spice that comes from G_d, the spice of loving and understanding and compassion, makes everything go down better for everybody.

I do confess to being occasionally distracted by the fact that not across the house in person, and yet on the screen, I saw people double–in different colors. White shirts turned deep pink, complexions reddened greatly, a yellow and green tie turned plain orange, left vs right eye. So strange.

I finished my cowl and, with memories of New Orleans in mind, wished I could try the beignet Dad never quite got around to when we were there.

It’s the weekend of the World Conference of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, with three two-hour sessions today and two tomorrow. Look for the tallest man (I think) in the Mormon Tabernacle Choir and wave hi at my cousin Jim with me.

Last year, a month before the election, one of the songs the leadership chose had the line “The scepter will fall from the despot’s grasp when with winds of stern justice he copes…” Loved it.

The opening segment today began with a heartfelt plea to choose to be a peacemaker. To follow the teachings of Christ, *the* Peacemaker, who tended to all, women, children, occupier centurions, the much-married and now not bothering with that part Samaritan woman at the well whom he did not judge but simply told her, now that she had felt the immense love and acceptance of his presence, to go and sin–to separate herself from that Love–no more.

The next speaker was a Black woman. The next, Hispanic. There was this unspoken, Do you get the message yet. We are all children of our Heavenly Father and all deserve to be treated with respect and honored as beings created by G_d no matter our faith or our background.

And that last talk of the day! Where a man blamed himself, he was sure it had to have been his fault, that clearly he had not done a good enough job of fully checking out the small plane that his pilot wife and her friends had crashed in. He was in agony.

If someone has wronged you, was the message, forgive. If you have wronged someone, take responsibility for it, fully repent to G_d for having done it, do all that you can to make amends to any who have suffered because of your mistakes.

And then honor the Divine by accepting what the Divine has offered to you: forgive yourself.

A year later, all at once and unexpected and yet in response to fervent prayer in deeply missing his wife, that gift washed over him. He felt her near, felt G_d near, saying it was okay.

And it healed him.

When my kids were teens there was a shop at the mall that made me wonder why a place that sold bath salts and the like smelled like a cookie as you walked past.

Turns out vanilla was their most popular scent.

I like vanilla too but I don’t want to bathe in it. (Man, can you imagine what that would cost now? With shortages and crop failures, vanilla was the most expensive spice in the world last I checked.)

Fast forward: Trying to come up with a solution for me, Michelle was talking about dry shampoos.

Me: Yeah, I tried one of those–about 40 years ago; I wasn’t impressed.

Well, she said, they’re basically just starch.

Me: I know! The potato starch in the pantry!

You should have seen the look of horror on her face. I had to assure her quickly that I was totally joking.

But I was thinking of that shop as I said it: Man, *sniff* isn’t it a little early for Thanksgiving? If I walked around smelling like mashed potatoes because I wasn’t allowed to get my head wet, how would you even be able to wash it out at the regret of it.

If you’re going to be weird, yeah, I’d go with the vanilla first.

Day four: without thinking about it, I had both eyes open while knitting, whereas yesterday I kept the one closed without even thinking about it.

It made me think about it: I suddenly realized what was bugging me so much. The visual image at center, such as it was on the right, didn’t quite entirely come together properly with the left. Like one hand was off by an inch or so towards and away from me from each other, like trying to put a torn page back in the book and getting it wrong. It was so strange. I had to force myself to keep going. But Aftober, the annual finish your UFO by the end of the month race, is on and I want this afghan finally done. By the third long row I let go and just went with it and let it amuse me.

One more week till I can wash my hair. That eye cannot get wet.

One more week till I can take the hospital warning bracelet off announcing I have a gas bubble in my eye.

I was told I could not go above 1000′ elevation. If I wanted to go to Santa Cruz, I absolutely was to take the long way around across the valley and not over the mountains, and the doctor said with more emotion than he probably intended, Don’t! Go! to Tahoe!!

I wondered which one of his patients had decided to use his medical time off to go skiing with an eye mask on and what had possessed him, but apparently someone did and it was a notable enough case that all such patients at that clinic are now specifically forbidden Tahoe. High elevation changes the gas. You do not want to mess with what that gas bubble was put there to do.

I wondered what on earth people who live in Denver do.

Poking around, I found a story of an elderly woman who’d come to NIH because she’d had retina surgery and then a cardiac event. The ER saved her life but didn’t know about her surgery and so didn’t contact the surgeon, and the treatment they used forced her gas bubble into her brain. It recovered. But her eye was blinded.

The bracelet says, Contact opthalmologist on reverse side before treatment.

I took a peek at the inside edge.

Nobody had filled it out.

I was amused. (The doctor probably wouldn’t be.)

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.

They had me come back today to measure the pressure in my eye and make sure all was well and for me to ask questions.

Was it normal to see, when we turned the lights off last night, a blazing half-circle of light?

The retina specialist chuckled. Yes, it was. And this and this and this: everything was as it should be. But be careful: he counseled sitting on the couch and acting like a slug. Yes, knit, definitely, no, four pounds of wool is not too heavy a project.

Michelle and I were walking to the parking garage when I suddenly stopped. Coming as we were going…

Mrs. M? I asked.

She didn’t quite stop but she didn’t quite answer.

Shirley M? I asked again. The woman who had asked me about twenty years ago, Do you remember in this neighborhood in 1952 when….  And I’d grinned, I wasn’t born yet. She had expressed annoyance at my making her feel old.

She stopped. Wait–that name I’d just said. That WAS her!

I saw that I needed to explain who I was. ‘Your old neighbor across the fence’ didn’t quite do it at first. As Michelle described the encounter later, “She was a little confused.” But she eventually caught on and was delighted. We got to meet her son, who was bringing her in just like my daughter had been bringing me in and who was clearly delighted that his mother’s outing was turning into a reunion with the old neighborhood. (He was grown and gone by the time we showed up in the late 80’s.)

I knew she’d moved into assisted living when her husband had died; email sharing of stories is different from in person, though–and clearly, things had changed since that conversation. She told me again.

They both wanted to know if I’d met the new people who’d bought their house, and it was clearly important to them. I said I’d dropped off homegrown tomatoes but so far, I’d missed them.

Which means I need to go try again, and not only that, I now have an excuse to show up to do so: Mrs. M wants me to make sure you’re properly welcomed into the neighborhood.

And all was right in her world in those moments. It was great to see.

What I remember of the two surgeries while coming under the knife: the comfort of the unseen voice saying, This is Dr. M, right before he got to work on the cataract.

And then the comfort of the unseen voice, This is Dr. R, just before he started to work on the retina.

I was drugged out enough at that point that nothing else really entered in, but those two moments, those two decisions to connect with their patient, felt, when they did it, like it made all the difference, and that stayed with me.

There are no words.

My first thought when I heard the news was to my friend who had been through this before and how it must feel for her to see this again. Her cat had suddenly taken ill and instead of going to services she had taken him to the vet on emergency, where he died in her arms, while, unknown to her…

Someone in my Zoom knitting group tonight asked, with others nodding, Didn’t they have security?

The frank answer could only be, Mormons haven’t personally been put through this before.

(Well, the then-governor of Missouri ordered all of us to be shot on sight because we were threatening to outvote the slaveholders which would toss out the Missouri Compromise and end slavery hopefully peacefully, but that’s been awhile.)

I mentioned that our own ward had once been picketed by a group looking to intimidate.

But they got our start time wrong and almost nobody was there. Then there was a sudden hard downpour of cold rain and who was there to even notice they were even there? They left.

Then the sun came out for everybody arriving for church in the hour after that.

If only…

Meantime, my retina and cataract surgeries are in the morning. I have heard about bubbles and head angles and one person lying in bed for a week and a week of not looking up and not lifting anything–there’s a maybe on all of that, it depends on the doctor and the specific procedure–and I have no real idea what the next few days are going to be like.

To my sister Anne: don’t look.

I’m debating adding a splintered-off base of the tree to the end of that top log on the beaver lodge, and if I get really determined and if it works out okay, maybe the beaver itself. Maybe. And add a stitch to the turtle’s front leg on the far side to balance it a little better. Etc etc.

And of course eventually it will have a border all around. I don’t usually do white for a border but in real life it matches bright for bright and I quite like it. The only thing is that the gauge of that particular yarn came out looking looser than the others in the body of the thing. But hey. Ribbing can have its own character.

My memories of West Virginia are of gleaning huge peaches two weeks after the commercial harvest (for $2/bushel if I remember correctly, Mom?) and of visiting Harper’s Ferry and standing above where our Potomac River and their Shenandoah River come together in a huge rush of water.

I knitted in that little beaver lodge anyway. Just to let nature speak up for itself. 

Curious. This Supreme Court just in effect nullified its own Citizens United ruling.

Because it ruled in a shadow docket case, meaning one for which there were no hearings, was not aired publicly, with a decision that does not even have their names signed to it to hold themselves accountable to the public–that the president can decide to withhold funds that Congress had decided on a bipartisan basis to spend.

In this case, on foreign aid.

One of my high school friends was laid off from her USAID job months ago and she could tell you many a story about just how effective a peacemaker we were in the world in helping people learn to farm and feed each other better and in establishing public schools where there had been none. She saw it. She lived it. We were perceived as Good Samaritans. The Anya apricots that I go on and on about how intensely flavored and juicy they are? That’s how that original seed ended up here: a farmer from California working on behalf of the State Department befriended people along the Silk Road, who offered him their best to show the world what they had and that not everything there was about war. The good that’s done when individuals help individuals across cultures and backgrounds goes both ways and USAID, with little publicity or public knowledge, is how it happens.

And every year for decades, Congress has voted from both sides to sustain those efforts.

Power of the purse? Separation of powers? Constitution? Voting as a representative of one’s constituents on the matter? Pffft, who needs that. Wiped away with the swipe of an anonymous pen.The president controls all. And you know the only thing this one cares about money is how much of it goes to him.

So, since they can pay for nothing and do nothing now no matter how they vote, why would anyone donate to the campaign of any member of Congress again? (Or at least, of those who are going along with this.)

Besides, there are so many of them. Why bother when there are only six to have to deal with on the Court who have shown that they can be bought off.

The third and final peach tree is four rows into the untangle all five doubled strands stage. The peach is 50/50 cashmere/silk and sliiiiiiides right out. The grabby twisty overspun cashmere tree trunk, not so much.  Photo taken at the point where I only had those two left to extract from each other before the next go-round. It’s getting there!

Last week I went in with Richard to his appointment with the wound care specialist.

The doctor barely made eye contact with him, and me not at all. He dealt with the problem at foot, competently so. All business, all seriousness.

He had a follow-up Tuesday this week and again I came in in case there was anything the doctor wanted to teach me about taking care of those injured toes, since he had changed the protocol a little and who knows if he might again.

This time, I was wearing Galina’s gerdan with the small beaded bird perched on a Ukrainian bandura, singing its heart out. (Wow, that article: there was a time when you could be shot by the Bolshevik Russians for being a Ukrainian playing one. No wonder Galina used that imagery!)

The doctor came in, nodded hello, and did a slight double take as he seemed to be taking in the heart of that bird for a moment. Something in him seemed to let go of I could only guess what, and he exhaled.

He talked to us. He made eye contact this time. He took off the bandaging. He saw that all the open wounds but one were now healed and that that one was making progress, and that was very gratifying to him: last week he had said this could still go either way (meaning he could still lose those toes), but now, six weeks in, he said with clear relief that we were finally getting there.