I Can See Clearly Now/The Rain

There is an Asian elm tree that I can see out of my office window. In the winter, its branches trace intricate lines against the pale sky. Every few years, an arborist casts ropes through the branches and climbs up to trim the tree. One year, he pointed out a fork in the trunk with a rippled scar. He wasn’t sure, he said, but he thought it could have been lightning.

We almost cut the tree down when we first moved in. We had plans. Additions and improvements, efficiency, sustainability, modern living. None of these things happened. I’m glad: sometimes great horned owls use the tree as a nighttime rest stop. There have been hummingbird nests, and rafts of crows.

This winter, I will see it all more clearly. I got glasses last week. What do you know, they help me see better! Why didn’t I realize it worked like that?

On my way home from picking up the glasses, I called my husband and left a long message that basically said, “Everything looks so sharp!” The message did not sufficiently discharge my enthusiasm, so I called my mom and told her the same thing all over again.

“Do you have an astigmatism?” she asked.

“I have an astigmatism!” I crowed.

“It’s my left eye,” she said.

“It’s my left eye, too!” I said.

She apologized for giving it to me, but there was no reason to —  I later learned that the genes linked to astigmatism are only moderately heritable, and combine and interact in complex ways that affect the way light gathers in the eye. Besides, I loved my glasses.

Years ago, one of the first optometrists I went to seemed surprised when I told him I thought I was going to faint. This was after the doctor darkened the room and took an image of my retina, and suddenly all I could see were the branching afterimages of blood vessels swarming in front of me.

This never happens, he told me. I put my head between my knees anyway and waited for the white flashes to fade away.

This time, I rolled an office chair along a series of machines, peering into each one, and then spent a few minutes in a brightly lit room considering pairs of lenses. A week later, I had my glasses. I showed them off to my children. They are charming people who said how great they looked. “And everything looks so crisp! It’s amazing!” I said.

“The miracle of vision,” one told me, before going back to his homework.

At his age, I’d loved “the bird in a cage” exhibit at the Exploratorium in San Francisco. Stare at the dark eye of the image of the bird for 30 seconds, then look at its empty cage. The bird reappears, in a different color. (While people talk about this color being complementary — looking at a red bird would produce a green afterimage, for example—some research has shown that the afterimage can be a range of colors, and might vary from person to person.)

Another exhibit that fascinated me — a single line of light that, when you slowly moved your head side to side, would reveal the word “eye” or an image of the eye. The movement of your head would let your brain compile the image from a series of small “slices” of light. Persistence of vision: you can perceive the image even after the light itself has moved on.

The other night I woke up to flashes of white-purple light through the window, then deep booms of thunder. The dog raced into the room and took up a post by the glass door. A boy soon followed, leaping into the bed and covering his head with a pillow. We counted the seconds between flashes, sang “These Are a Few of My Favorite Things,” and talked about our neighbor, a photographer, who I thought would be out documenting the storm.

After a while, I got up to watch out the window, but I could only see the wide illumination of the sky with each flash, and not the jagged line of lightning. I did not think my glasses would help. I thought about the tree, its branches stretching above the roof, swaying in the passing storm. Did it have a memory of the lightning preserved somewhere within it? Then the electric moment passed, followed by the rain.

The next day, the sky cleared, and I looked at the elm for so long that I would like to think it lingers somewhere against my retina, its dark branches a bright, inverse glow. I want the image to stay, just as the tree persists, season after season, through every storm. I want to remember that it is still possible to see, even once the light is gone.

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Lightning on the Columbia River by Ian Boggs via Wikimedia Commons

Fundus of the right eye by Meri Vukicevic via Wikimedia Commons

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