My affliction of dry eyes, thanks to my Perceptual Processing Disorder, has gotten worse, thanks to being over the age of forty-five. Dry eyes is a common perimenopause symptom, and therefore at least half the month – or so it seems; I haven’t actually kept track – my eyes feel like sandpaper.
I became so desperate this last cycle that I contemplated buying eye drops. The thing is, the relief they bring is very temporary, say, five to ten minutes. Once upon I found a recipe for and made homemade “tears”. To my recollections, they weren’t any better than the manufactured eye drops, but since it costs mere pennies to whip up a batch I decided to try them again. After all, ten minutes of relief is ten minutes of relief, right?
Not wanting to look at a computer screen anymore than I had to, I asked J to find a recipe for homemade eye drops for me. He did, and began reading the ingredients.
“One cup organic distilled or purified water…”
He stopped, and I raised an eyebrow. “Organic?” I questioned in disbelief. “What the heck is organic water? Water grown without pesticides, herbicides, or synthetic fertilizer?”
J smiled, as amused by the verbiage as I. “Maybe it means water that doesn’t have any impurities in it.”
“But distilled water or pure water don’t have any impurities, by definition!” I argued. Not that my husband didn’t know this, but I think he was grasping at straws – as was I – to come with a reason to label water as “organic.”
Maybe organic water is water that has not fallen from the sky. Because between the jet fuel and weather modification chemicals and goodness-knows-what-else that are constantly being poured out into the atmosphere, rain water definitely has had artificial chemicals added to it of late.
Too bad, so sad. I made the homemade tears using the Berkey-purified rainwater that we collect for household use.
Then I applied a drop to each eye. Ah, sweet relief!
For seven or eight minutes.
Darn. Maybe if I’d used organic water, it would have lasted for ten.