Wrong.
It’s winter.
It’s much warmer than usual. It was just colder than usual. My Lyme hurts now. My Lyme doesn’t hurt now. The nights are very dark. The days are brilliant with the snow reflection. Peaches is sinking into powder or skating across ice.
Long ago, when I first bought this house, the only heat in winter was by woodstove. Or plug in electric. Because of that, there was no reason to actually plow the driveway in winter. We would just park up top in the garage that is just off the highway.
As anyone knows who has small children, especially if there are more than one – in this case four, all within 5 years of each other: you had to get the energy out of them, for your sanity and theirs.
Our strategy, in almost all kinds of weather, was to walk (or ride in the wheelbarrow when small) to the store at the gas station a 1/2 mile away which became named “the donut store”. If they could get there, the award was an otherwise forbidden donut.
But in winter, sometimes that could be a tall order with the cold and the snow. Instead: sledding.
Before we had the house rebuilt, the steep hill that leads down from the house – the hill that can be seen from the cozy inside the house – was left unplowed for sledding all winter long. We could slide and slide and slide.
And then climb up the snow covered road to the highway where the snow plow mounds along the neighboring driveway were higher than most of the children were tall: that was where we carved out snow tunnels.
And then the old house was torn down.
The wonderful architect that designed the new house, David Driscoll, was sly. He had radiant heat put in. Did I know? He knew. He knew it was the best thing ever. And was pleased as punch when we found out in our first winter stays here – it feels good to have warm feet/warm air.
But radiant heat meant that the house needed to be accessible all year for fire trucks to come down if need be. The driveway always had to be plowed. Because of the final steep hill leading down to the house, the carpenter at the time had that part of the road wired and then paved so it could be heated in winter. A brilliant idea.
Today, heading out after it rained on top of freezing snow – yes! I could walk up the hill. There is bare driveway where everything else is coated in ice and snow. Black against the white.
Sooooo… segue waying into another topic: my eyes. My eyes? The ones that see the black and the white.
On top of all the more obvious things I’m doing to heal my Lyme, I decided to take a course on vision improvement, with the idea that eyes don’t necessarily need to get worse with age, that vision can actually improve.
The course has surprised me. I had been doing chi gong where the eye muscle was one of the many body parts included. I had been including eye movement in my tai chi. BUT what I hadn’t been doing and what I didn’t know was the importance of – yes – black and white. Or rather light and dark. More than anything else, light helps eyes. Sunlight, daylight. Light. And more than anything else, dark rests the eyes – total dark.
This I didn’t know. In the northern state that I’m in now, the days are short. And winters tend to be cloudy. I thought the lamps people bought for winter season were for mood. But actually, they are making your eyes “happier/healthier”.
And when I had put my hands over my eyes therapeutically, I thought it was the warmth of my hand that was nourishing my eyes. But that’s just part of it. The deep rest the eyes get. Dark helps.
Light and dark. Black and white.
Which is all I see anyway – Peaches.
