BRINGING COLOUR BACK INTO OUR LIVES

When my husband and I were married 27 years ago we were both fortunate to still be able to see some colours--well, at least enough to see dark shades from light shades, just enough to make it possible for us to separate the clothes for the laundry. But now neither of us can see anything at all and it does make life complicated when there’s no one else in the house except for our two guide dogs.

For many years now we’ve been looking for a device that could help us with this dilemma and were ecstatic when we heard about a couple of items that were just new on the market.

We ordered one from Ottawa and when we received it the first thing we did was to check the colours of our two guide dogs. Gladys is a beautiful Labrador/golden cross which means she is several shades of brown. The colour identifier, however, told me that she was orange with dark green ears. It was the day before Halloween so I kind of thought it was a joke. My husband’s dog, Quaker is a beautiful black lab but the colour identifier said he was dark purple with a pink belly. We had a good laugh over the whole thing but were very disappointed when the silly thing told me that the t-shirt I was wearing was black when it was completely white. It didn’t like navy either because it classified all navy blue items as dark purple.

Needless to say, we decided to send it back to the company and order another one which promised to be more accurate and came all the way from England.

We were so excited the day it arrived. As soon as I took it out of the box I went around checking the colour of almost everything in sight. It told me that Gladys is once again light brown with dark brown ears and Quaker is back to his normal pure black.

We’re now able to differentiate our white running shoes from our black ones, our light blue jeans from our darker blue jeans and our black socks from our white ones. It’s now easier to match up the towels with the right face cloths and the sheets with the correct pillow cases. I will continue to sew Braille labels on our clothes and other things because it’s much faster and more convenient but it sure is nice to know that if the socks come unpinned in the washing machine I can once again pair them up. What a great sense of freedom and independence this little device has given us.