27

It is so difficult to get up early when it is still dark, and you are still so sad.
But we do it anyway, drive to the gym through the burgeoning light filling the snowy world.  And we do all the awful gym things, with strange torturous devices and belts to run on like hamsters.

Then to an eye appointment, where I discover that my eyes are really "remarkable" for my age. The lovely doctor who has been trying to cure my post-menopausal dry-eye condition for years now, looking down his long friendly nose at me, cheerfully encourages me to try yet another possible "cure".  But everything is explained, nothing is taken lightly, and he seems to have a prodigious memory for my ocular history. 

The eye is an incredibly complicated organ, and often used to illustrate irreducible complexity, the theory behind the strange idea of "intelligent design" being responsible for life as we know it, as opposed to the theory of evolution.  Irreducible complexity argues "that certain biological systems  are too complex to have evolved from simpler, or "less complete" predecessors, through natural selections acting upon a series of advantageous naturally occurring, chance mutations."  -http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irreducible_complexity

The eye in all its wonderful beauty.

The eye is one of the most important parts of our bodies, definitely the most important of the face.  The eyes are what we look at when we talk to someone, and all kinds of things travel through eyes: lies, love, cruelty, lust, fear, kindness, humour. 

In the family of my childhood everyone had blue or blue-green eyes.  My British gramp had the most astonishingly bright blue eyes, inherited by my dad and several of his grandchildren. I have one brown-eyed child, due to more brown alleles on a gene-pair from a chromosome donated by her father, who has brown eyes. Her eyes are not so much brown as greenish-hazel.  When she has been crying they are very green.

All my other children have blue eyes, carrying on the Radford/Webster line, descending from the Scandinavians, whose sky-blue eyes apparently originated from a single mutation in a gene called OCA2, which arose by chance somewhere around the coast of the Black Sea in one single individual, about 8,000 years ago, according to a Copenhagen-based team of researchers published in the journal Human Genetics.

The oddness of Europeans is a kind of genetic mystery.  Europeans are the only people who have blue eyes and many shades of hair-colour.  Everywhere else in the world people are dark-haired and dark-eyed.

Recent genetic testing on a well-preserved skeleton of a hunter-gatherer who lived 7,000 years ago revealed surprisingly that the man had blue eyes and dark skin, and was most closely genetically related to people in Sweden and Finland.  Before his genome was sequenced, using DNA from one of his teeth, it was believed that light skin happened a long time ago, shortly after Africans moved into the higher latitudes of Europe, about 45,000 years ago.  Now it seems that the lightening of skin has only appeared in the last 7,000 years.

Fascinating, how the lines continue, Luna has bright blue eyes, Ella beautiful hazel ones.  The water and the earth.

Matthew, Nicholas and Tim gave me a silver ring with three elephants on it for Christmas.  As I put it on each morning I think of the givers, and every time I notice it I am happy about the three men in my family.  And I am also glad that there are still amazing creatures like elephants in the world.