My long term eye doctor retired. He saved my eyes after I wasted three years with a guy with credentials but who did me no good. He told me nothing could really be done with my combination at the time of cataracts nearsightedness and glaucoma. The vision in my left eye kept deteriorating and I was facing blindness. While I was seeing him, I tried every quack remedy anybody mentioned to me. Then my gynecologist at the time, who is on the right to life’s so called hit list to kill – I guess he has no right to life -- said this was nonsense. He insisted I go to Dr. Gorn, who said, of course there were operations that could help. and there were. My eyes have been mostly stable since all those series of operations and procedures over a five year period. Anyhow, my dear doctor Gorn, a warm and cultured man, has retired. I have a new doctor whom I can see on the Cape instead of driving to Boston [which would actually be impossible now], and Friday she changed one of my medications. We’ll see how it works out. It’s always a drag to go there. It’s a large place with rotating doctors and you always spend hours sitting around waiting. We used to take medicines; now it’s medications. Some Latinate replacements are euphemisms: we used to get high or take downers, but now we self-medicate. Sign I saw last week: Park in your designated station instead of Park where you’re supposed to or Park in your own space. Sometimes the words actually obfuscate: X and Y had an altercation; did they have a loud argument or a fight? We are hemmed in by ice and walls of snow, but we have been coming and going. It’s always a bit tense as I CANNOT fall with my new plastic and titanium knees, but I do go out. We went to the eye doctor in West Yarmouth, about a 50 minute drive, and then last night we went out to have dinner with friends. They are just back from Puerto Rico where they were visiting other friends who spend the winter in their condo there. They are good cooks and good friends. While Melenie is up in her 25 below zero residency writing her memoir, Dale is filling in for her on Mondays. It has been working well. It’s weird to hire a friend to work for you as their boss, but I know he’s done the same with another friend. We are hoping for lots of rain tomorrow, lots and lots, to wash away some of the cliffs and mounds of snow. Our car is still iced in. We use the truck for everything. A couple of nights ago a woman took a curve too quickly and crashed into the side of the road. The snowbank demolished her car and it took the jaws of life to get her out. That’s what the sides of the road are like now: might as well be stone like those little countryside roads in England, where stone walls hide under greenery on narrow twisting roads hedged in. At least we’ve had a lot of sun this week. Even when the temperature is below zero, we have a little melting. The icicles hanging daggers off the eaves have dripped themselves into oblivion. The snow is blinding but remarkably beautiful. I’m writing many poems and beginning to work a little on my haggadah.