#seeingcolors

On Tuesday, my husband saw pinks, purples, and oranges for the first time in his 29 years. He’s red-green colorblind, and ever since our high school dating days (yep, we met in 10th grade band) it’s been a goal of mine to help him see colors better. Something of a bucket list item for me, though he never talked about it.

Image credit color-blindness.com

The thing is, he never knew what he was missing, but I did, and it pained me to some extent. The experience of seeing a purpley-pink sunset, or a rainbow in its entirety. The beautiful variety in a garden. All of the emotions that a full range of color can evoke in us. He’s a scientist, a chemical engineer, and color just doesn’t come into play as often as Bill Nye the Science Guy might have you believe. When he sees an object, he focuses on its texture and shape, whereas most of us tend to determine its color first. And if he needs to know about a color, he just asks. (Was that a purple firework? Are you sure I’m not wearing a pink shirt?)

But on Tuesday, standing in our backyard, he donned the pair of EnChroma sunglasses that our daughter and I had gifted him and after several seconds, he knelt down to inspect one of our purple peony bushes. I think he looked at a single bloom for nearly a minute. He proceeded to walk across the deck to study our honeysuckle vine, covered in fiery orange blooms. He took the sunglasses off, then slid them back on and smiled. So this is what orange looks like. He’d always thought that vine bloomed a pale yellow.

I asked him to come around to the front yard to see what he could see. When he spotted our hanging basket of periwinkle and bright pink flowers, the one we’d bought at Costco last weekend, he took it off its hook and set it on the ground, just to have a good stare. He had never seen the difference between the two colors. They were absurdly bright, absurdly saturated, and so very beautiful. He said they looked like they were glowing.

Later in the evening, he recalled various times when color blindness had played into his life. When all the other second graders had drawn blue or orange fish, and he’d drawn a purple one. Or when a teacher had instructed him to refer to colors on a pie chart that all looked the same. He said when he wore the glasses, he could feel pressure behind his eyes. Probably, he figured, because they were sending messages that his brain had never received before. We wondered together if that’s what it feels like when you’re born, that pressure behind the eyes. The brain receiving new signals for the first time. We wondered if colorblind people are more likely to go into careers that are objective and less artistic. He teared up. “Are you sad?” I asked. “No,” he replied. “I’m happy because I get to experience this now.” And we thought about all of the things we’d be doing this summer.