My partner had cataract surgery on her right eye yesterday. This morning, as we were sitting on the couch drinking coffee, she was alternately covering her left eye and then her right eye, comparing the images. Looking north at the twilight just before the sun had reached the horizon, she said, “When I cover my right eye, the sky looks yellowish, and when I cover my left eye,  the sky looks bluish. When I look through both eyes, the right side of the sky is yellowish and the left side is bluish.”  Then she turned to me and said, “What color is the sky really?” I realized that there was no one absolute right answer. The observed color depended not only on the time of the day, but also on which eye she was using and the degree of yellowing of the crystalline lens that had occurred in the eye that did not have surgery. The yellowing is a natural process that happens as the crystalline lens ages.

Then she said, “Color is an amazing and wonderous quality. It brings to mind so many questions. Isn’t it awful that nowadays any talk about color just ends civil conversation?”

I didn’t answer as I wondered if me drinking black coffee was a type of  cultural appropriation.