The Letters That Came Home

My eyes

I should have seen the trouble coming, but I was busy, and the trouble came in the way that real trouble does, a little at a time so you can tell yourself it is nothing.

First it was the fine print on the ink bottle. Then it was faces at the far end of the grocery that would not quite resolve.

Then one evening I was reading the paper and there was a gray smudge sitting square in the middle of the page, and when I moved the paper the smudge moved with it.

The doctor in the city has a long name for what I have. Macular degeneration, the dry kind. What it means in plain words is that the center of everything I look at is going soft and gray, and it does not come back.

He told me, kindly, that I would keep my side vision for a long time. That I would not walk into walls. That I would still know my own kitchen and my own yard.

But the center, he said. The center is where the reading lives. The center is where you look at a line to write it straight.

I drove home that day and I sat in the drive a long while before I went in.

I went back in September to learn the things you learn. How to pour a cup of coffee by hooking a finger over the rim and feeling for the heat. How to find a dropped pill on a pale floor by its shadow instead of its shape. How to walk my own hallway by the memory in my feet. The young woman who taught me was patient and matter of fact, and she told me the thing I needed, which was that losing your sight is not the same as losing your life, and that people confuse the two and give up the second over the first.

I am seventy-two. I have had a good run with these eyes. I taught forty years of children to read with them and I am not owed anything.

But I sat in that drive and the one thing I could not get past, the only thing, was the letters.

May was coming. And for the first time in thirty-eight years I was going to let a class of children walk across that floor and out the side door into the summer with nobody putting down in writing that they had been seen.