My first look at the world with new lenses was startling in a wholly positive way. The yellow caste of cataracts had colored my world gradually and thus much more fully than I’d realized. With the cloudy lenses I’ve looked through for a year gone and clear implants in their place the world was suddenly much brighter and bluer than I knew.
I’d forgotten. Light has an edge and over the lip of the edge is blue, like the underside of a snowdrift or the last slide of winter dusk indigo before it goes black.
I can see across a field like I could when I was twenty. The line of trees on the far side of the pasture out my study window is sharp, with distinct white trunks of birch scattered among the oaks and white pine. Without glasses.
It’s close to miraculous.
Grace Mattern 