The View from the Summit

Yesterday's run was indeed  remarkable for February.  Once again I found myself in shorts and T-shirt, running by the frozen Harris Lake (no longer safe for ice-skating, but still covered with a milky skim of ice).  And it was good to run up venerable Big Bearpen Mountain again after the unrelenting flat roads of Amelia Island.  I had e-mailed my friend Fred, who lives on the very summit, and told him how I had been missing my favorite running route and asking him whether the roads were still icy on the summit.  He told me that it would be better not to admit that I actually enjoyed running up Bearpen.

On the summit, there were muddy ruts where only a short time ago there had been ice.  The vista is always a little different, but this time I could make out the lakes of South Carolina, glimmering out along the horizon.  Or was it just a mirage?  My eyesight has been deteriorating a bit more than usual, aggravated by cataracts and compounded by an incident that had happened two or three weeks ago when (I believe) I had been keeping a very hot fire going in the fireplace insert.  I realized one morning that there was something wrong with my transition lenses:  a fine spiderweb cracking developed all along the surface, which I determined from reading some on-line forums was probably caused by the heat of the open fireplace.  My potter friend confirmed that one of his friends had suffered the same problem with his transitions, caused he thought by a hot kiln.  So on the way down the mountain, light strobing through the trees, I actually took off my glasses and could see better without them.

Effective February 1, my Medicare coverage became effective, which is both comforting and frightening.  So today I spent some time with my opthalmologist, Dr. Secosan in Brevard, who has been treating my eyes for 25 years and performed the glaucoma surgery (called a trabeculectomy) on  them nearly 20 years ago.  I decided to have cataract surgery in one eye.  Is this what everybody does when they go on Medicare,  I wondered?  Go to Florida and have cataract surgery?