I CAN SEE CLEARLY NOW

Since the age of twelve, I’ve been nearly legally blind and have worn glasses or contacts. After recent cataract surgery, I now have 20/20 vision and the relief that, during my recovery, my older ego allowed me to go out in public without the eye makeup I’ve worn every day for sixty years. 

The medication I took during my recovery caused “malaise”, which means I basically couldn’t get up off the couch without exhaustion. Now, I’m enjoying brighter colors and clearer street signs and “reader” glasses hanging from a rainbow-colored chain around my neck. My granddaughter, Sophie, told me I’ve advanced one more step in grandmotherhood. Ed loves my face sans spectacles. I see dirt I couldn’t see, so my housekeeping has improved a teeny bit. Well, less than teeny, but some. 

But I didn’t write. No essays, no book reviews, no fiction. I tried to convince myself that my inability to put butt in chair and turn out something comprehensible was due to my “malaise”, but I knew that my ability to write had disappeared when the pandemic hit and we traveled back and forth to California and my inner and outer worlds turned upside down. I’d think about writing and my mind would go blank and then I’d go binge watch Maid or Queen’s Gambit or Queer Eye. 

Recently, Ed was working on a sermon on “epiphanies”, making me wonder about my own spiritual awareness and the “ahas” that have impacted and changed me. As I was struggling to put words to the times when I “saw” or “knew” something that opened my eyes wider, I vaguely remembered something I’d written almost twenty years ago in my memoir, “Catching On—Love with an Avid Flyfisher.” I thumbed through the book and found this: 

“A knowing hit me. Not a flashing light or a hammer-crash. A knowing. Brief, but undeniable.”

That the passage was about meeting and being immediately attracted to Ed didn’t detract from the fact that what hit me this time when I read it–a knowing, brief but undeniable–was how passionate I was about writing back then, how I’d write every day, how, when I saw something funny or beautiful or awful or scary, I’d scribble my impressions, excited about what I might create. And what hit me harder, with a brief but undeniable knowing and tears covering my face, was how much I missed and longed for that passion to come back from wherever the pandemic demons were holding it hostage. A valuable part of my life was missing. Not okay. Undeniably not okay. 

I can see clearly now. Not just through my new lenses. I see again how much writing feeds my soul and gives my brain worthwhile workouts and satisfies me like nothing else. I. Need. To. Write.

Till next month….

                                                                                             #