Three Excerpts from The Braille Encyclopedia

Proof

I tear open a foil packet and a cascade of yeast granules hisses into a cup of warm water, tested against my wrist. Yeast, wise little beasts, only work in comfort. The granules ride the surface resistance for a moment, then fall, one by one, into their deep. Yeast wakes up and multiplies.

Proofing: testing the yeast before committing flour and salt, oil and elbow grease to the making of bread. Or perhaps the yeast tests us, decides in its democracy of single-celled sisters whether this house, this kitchen, this bowl, is worthy of its gift of loft to a loaf.

Mathematical proof. How I loved in eighth-grade geometry writing the letters QED—Quod erat demonstrandum—that which was to be demonstrated, or proved, underlining the three letters with two firm pencil lines.

But today, I show things to my eyes all day long and they no longer see the proof of it. They cannot glance around the room and confirm that the stove is off, the windows closed, the milk back in the fridge. If seeing is believing, then is blindness doubt?
 

Slivovitz

An Eastern European plum brandy. I made my first batch in 2015 to salvage our Minnesota plum tree’s first crop. I scrounged a recipe online. Slivovitz, like learning braille, feeds on time as well as effort. The brandy requires a minimum of three months to bubble in the dark, which translates into some explaining to my spouse, Ray. He tolerates my experiments in pickling, but he needs reassuring after he comes across the gallon jar of eyeball-sized orbs floating in blood-tint liquid in the cellar.

It took three years for that plum tree we planted to bear brief white blossoms. Five years before it bore a crop of plums to ripeness. Its thin branches hung to the ground with fruit the size of quail eggs, their indigo skins dusted white, their insides chartreuse. But the taste on the tongue oozed pale and bitter. The idea for slivovitz grew from desperation, the piles of fruit starting to rot on the counter.

How many years did it take for a horticulturalist to come up with a variety of Prunus that would self-pollinate and bear fruit in our peach-less Zone 4? When Ray drove the spade into our backyard soil, we found animal bones. How many years did it take for those bones to decay to that rusty orange, for everything else to fall away? What were the chances that enough of my slivovitz-drinking, Yiddish-speaking ancestors would emigrate to America, some time after a stretch of pogroms, but before the Holocaust? A thread of chance lets me remember tiny glasses filled from a round bottle after dinner, guests sipping slivovitz, snipping piles of grapes with stork-shaped scissors, when it wasn’t a crime for parents to hand children a thimble of alcohol, fierce and sweet.

When I strain out the plums, their flesh, once queasy green, has flushed to rich red, the influence of those indigo skins. The brandy that remains glows bright red-purple. Nothing like the commercial clear firewater of my youth, this stuff’s become its own thing. The plums and sugar and knuckle of lemon skin and spirit and cinnamon stick, rolled tight as a Torah, all evolve, dissolve into slivovitz.

I started learning braille about the same time we planted that plum tree. Five years to arrive at anything like literacy. Another patient fermentation.
  

Yellow

Light with a wavelength of around 570 nanometers. Yellow pigments come from so many things you shouldn’t eat, like cadmium and uranium, one form of which is called yellowcake. When I was little, one physics building at the University of Chicago had a basement corridor with lovely yellow ceramic tiles. According to the technicians who worked there—one of whom was married to my childhood pottery teacher, Dorothy—they were made with a uranium-based glaze that still emitted radiation.

Genuine Naples Yellow pigment was made of lead. Chrome yellow. Yellows from tin and rutile and benzodiazepines. Other than the honest dirt of a natural yellow ocher, all a pretty poisonous lot.

Even if you could find a brilliant yet edible yellow pigment, nothing could beat the yellow of the eggs Ray made me a few days after my abdominal surgery in 2021. Propped up in my tattered robe, I was grateful my decayed vision spared me details of the six-inch incision, covered with its grin of Steri-Strips. Still wobbly from the useful poison of general anesthetic, I wanted none of my usual Sriracha, kimchi, or salsa verde. I declined even black pepper, just wanted salt and scrambled eggs, a fluffy buttery mass on dark pumpernickel. I’m not even embarrassed to repeat the animal grunts of delight over being alive to eat that yellow cloud, to live with a man who knows how to scramble an egg, to still see enough to see the visible yellowness of wavelength reflected back into my eyes.

Yellow, hallelujah. Yellow butter in the pan. Yellow sun clearing my neighbors’ houses on a winter morning. Sometimes I stare straight at it, what do I have to lose?

Naomi Cohn is a writer and teaching artist whose work explores adaptation. Her recent book, The Braille Encyclopedia: Brief Essays on Altered Sight, won the Eric Hoffer Award Grand Prize, Foreword Indies Silver for Autobiography and Memoir, and the IPY Gold Award for Creative Nonfiction. Her work’s also appeared in About Place, Baltimore Review, LitHub, Hippocampus, Ninth Letter, and Poetry, among other places. Cohn has also appeared on NPR and been recognized by a McKnight Fellowship, Minnesota State Arts Board grants, and residencies at Ucross, Monson Arts, Write On Door County, and Bloedel Reserve, among others. Raised in Chicago, she now lives on unceded Dakota territory in Saint Paul, Minnesota. Her current work probes her obsession with birds and reclaiming relationships with art-making and the rest of the natural world.

Read more by Naomi Cohn appearing in Terrain.org: “In Light of a White Cane,” an essay, and “Into the Fire—,” a Letter to America poem.

Header photo by picfoods, courtesy Pixabay. Photo of Naomi Cohn by Anna Min.