I Can See Clearly Now and the Rain is Gone But It Will Be Back RE: I Live in the Seattle Area

It seems that everyone who lives within a 500 mile radius of Seattle just says they’re from Seattle to save time. I sort of fall into that category. Our plays, concerts, zoos, museums and company parties are in Seattle but our home is outside the city, a ways outside. We live where things are a bit cheaper and there’s more room to breathe but we still share the same clouds and beautiful green vegetative greenness.

The past couple of weeks we’ve seen much more sunshine than is normal. Cherry trees are blossoming. Stars have even been visible at night. I’ve had to dig out my sunglasses a couple of times and Wanda’s skin sparkles like diamonds when we go outside. It’s her first exposure to sunlight since birth and we’re starting to wonder about her…

As much as I love the sunshine, I’m suspicious of it. Why is it sunny? Is the frost going to kill all the flowers? Are we about to have a major “weather event”? Does this mean it’s going to rain all summer? Perhaps Al Gore is behind this. Whatever happens, I’ll be able to see it clearly because I am the proud owner of a new pair of glasses.

I recently went in to have my eyes checked. It turns out it’s been a few years since I’ve been to the eye doctor and some things have changed, things like clothing styles and my vision.

I went to Lens Crafters, which I am convinced is a vortex not unlike the Bermuda Triangle. When we walk into that store my electronic devices stop working completely and Wanda poops through whatever she’s wearing. We tried this twice in one day and it happened both times.

The doctor asked me to look at some things. Lights blinked. I showed my peripheral vision prowess. Someone blew a puff of air in my pupils. She asked me how often I wore my current glasses. I told her that I wore them if they looked cute with my outfit or if it would benefit me to look studious at the moment. She laughed. I wasn’t kidding.

When she asked me to read the lowest line of clear letters from the eye-doctor-getting-smaller-letter-card-thing, I started to rub my eyes.

“Things are a bit blurry,” I said, “I think I have some sleep in my eyes. Just let me get this, um, sleep out of my eyes and I’ll tell you which line I can read.”

The truth was that it was 11am and I’d been awake for several hours but I could not believe that I could not see the bottom few lines. I could always see all the lines. I kept rubbing the strange goo that seemed to be blocking my vision. The doctor suggested we try out some lenses so she brought out the crazy goo-goo goggles and started in with the, “Which looks better, one or two, and one or two, and now one… or two?”

After doing this for a while I found that things suddenly began to look clear, too clear, strangely, freakishly, stop-saving-for-the-HDTV-because-now-the-whole-world’s-HD clear. My vision is not that bad but the glasses really make a difference and I’m shocked at how long I let it go like that, not realizing that I couldn’t see as well as I should be able to.

For the next few days, I walked around lifting the glasses up and dropping them back down and smiling. Dan would say, “Do they still work?” They DO! There are so many things that I’ve discovered are supposed to have crisp edges to them, road signs that are legible way sooner than I thought. Seeing = fun. Hopefully they go with every outfit because as long as I can manage to remember them, I’ll have these babies on a lot.