There is even, as my eyes make better use of the dusk and I lift my head off the pillow to look around, something marvelously reassuring about the room, a warmth even in the gloom. I have spent too many good days and nights in this cottage to be depressed by it. I should feel as if I were waking up in some Ma-and-Pa motel in hard-times country, but I don’t. Nothing has been refreshed or added since Charity and Sid turned the compound over to the children. What used to be aggressively spartan is shabby now. But I see, or remember, or both, the uncurtained windows, the bare rafters, the board walls with nothing on them except a calendar that I think was here the last time we were, eight years ago. The light is no more than dusk that leaks past the edges of the blinds. I am awake.Ĭataract sufferers must see like this when the bandages are removed after the operation: every detail as sharp as if seen for the first time, yet familiar too, known from before the time of blindness, the remembered and the seen coalescing as in a stereoscope. Floating upward through a confusion of dreams and memory, curving like a trout through the rings of previous risings, I surface.
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