For Thirty Years I Read the World in Grey, and Then Someone Gave the Browns Back

The window that would not get clean

For the last few years before I retired I kept cleaning the kitchen window. I would stand at the sink with a cloth and a bottle of vinegar water and work at the glass, and the garden on the other side stayed the same soft, dim yellow it had always been lately, like weak tea through muslin. My late husband used to tease me that I had the cleanest grubby window in Pretoria. I did not argue. I thought the problem was the glass, or the afternoon light, or my age, which I was quietly starting to resent.

I spent thirty one years as a radiographer in a large hospital. You would think a woman who stared at images all day would notice her own eyes dimming. I think that is exactly why I did not. I lived in grey for a living. Bone against tissue, the pale ghost of a lung, the dense white of a hip replacement. I read the world in shades of one colour and I was good at it, and somewhere along the way I stopped expecting anything else from my eyes. Colour became a thing other people got excited about. Sunsets. Jacarandas. I would nod and think about supper.

The cataracts came on so slowly that by the time the optometrist said the word out loud, I had already forgotten what I was missing. One eye, then the other, a few weeks apart. The operations themselves were almost rude in how quick they were. A clinic, a plastic chair, a clock on the wall, and then a small dressing taped over my face and a packet of drops I had to set alarms for.

My daughter's idea

It was my daughter, Lindi, who decided I should not do the recovering at home. She is a practical woman, more practical than I ever was, and she had watched me spend the months after her father died turning our house into a place I could hide inside. She did not say that. She said, "Ma, you cannot sit in that lounge peeling the labels off your eye drops. You need somewhere with nothing to tidy."

She found a small Botswana safari lodge on the far eastern edge of the country, out where the Limpopo and the Shashe come together and the land goes flat and open, and she booked me four nights without really asking. I protested on principle. I said it was too far, too much, that my eyes were still settling, that I would only sit in the room. She drove me to the border herself and did not entertain a word of it.

The first morning

The thing nobody warns you about new eyes is that they arrive before you are ready for them. The surgeon takes out the clouded lens and drops in a clear one, and suddenly the dial that had been turned down for years is turned all the way up, and you have no say in the matter.

I noticed it properly on the first morning there. I had gone out onto the little veranda before the light was fully up, holding my coffee, still half expecting the old tea-coloured world. And it was not there. The bush in front of me was not brown. It was forty browns. I stood there like a fool and tried to count them. The dry red brown of the earth. The grey brown of the fallen branches. A soft mushroom colour on the backs of the impala. The almost purple brown of a shadow under a tree. And then, as the sun actually came over the ridge, a thin gold ran along the top of everything, along every blade and twig, and I had to sit down on the step because my legs did not feel reliable.

A man who worked there asked, kindly, if I was all right. I said I had just had my eyes done. He thought I meant I was struggling to see. I did not know how to tell him it was the opposite, that I was seeing far too much, that the dust itself had a colour, a pale apricot where it hung in the light behind the vehicles, and that I had not known dust had a colour in my entire adult life.

The notebook

On the second day I did something I had not done since I was a girl. I asked at the main area whether anyone had a pencil and some paper I could borrow, and a young woman found me a soft pencil and a plain notebook with a brown cover. I used to draw, long ago, before the hospital, before marriage, before I decided I was a sensible person who read images rather than made them. I had not opened a sketchbook in something like forty years.

I was terrible at first. My hand had no memory of it. But I was not drawing to be good. I was drawing to make myself slow down and actually look, the way you look when you have to put a thing down on paper. I drew the knuckle of a branch. I drew the way a guineafowl's back is not grey at all but a hundred tiny white spots on slate. I spent most of one afternoon on a single leadwood tree, trying to get the grey of its dead wood, which is not the grey of anything in a hospital. It is a living grey, if that makes sense. Warm. I kept wetting the pencil and I kept getting it wrong and I did not mind.

What the bush was really for

People go on a Botswana safari to see the big things, and we did see them. One evening a herd of elephants crossed in front of us so close I could hear the sand move under their feet, and I confess my eyes filled, though I think that was as much about the eyes themselves as the animals. But the big things were never really the point for me, not on this trip. The point was the small relearning. The exact ochre of a termite mound. The green, the actual green, of a thing growing in a dry place, which I had been seeing as grey for so long that the greenness of it felt almost loud.

I heard other guests talk about which of the various Botswana lodges they had been to, comparing notes the way travellers do, and I had nothing to add, because I had not come for the place. I had come to get my eyes back, and the place happened to be where that occurred.

Home, with the browns

I have been home a good while now. The kitchen window is the same window, and I have stopped attacking it with vinegar, because I understand at last that it was never dirty. The garden out there is green and gold and a dozen browns, and some evenings I stand at the sink and simply look at it, which my daughter finds very funny and does not say so.

The notebook sits by my bed. I still draw, badly, most days. I draw the lemons on the tree, the grey of the paving after rain, the particular colour of my own hands in the lamplight, which turn out to be more interesting than I ever gave them credit for. I spent three decades reading the inside of people in grey. It took a surgeon, and a stubborn daughter, and a few quiet days a long way north, to let me start reading the outside of the world in colour again.