Guide dog Lola is lying in her basket. The rain is tapping on the skylights of the extension. Elian drinks a cup of tea at the dining table. Peace and relaxation dominate on this dark December day in the living room of the terraced house in Santpoort. And that is news, good news.
Elian ends one of the most stressful years of her life. “I’m going to recover first,” she says. Recovering from a divorce and especially recovering from the move, including renovation. While a move is normally a stressful event, it has twice as much impact on Elian.
Shades and colours
“You have to get used to everything,” says Elian, who is seeing increasingly less well due to congenital cataracts and complications. “With my left hand I can’t see anything, with my right hand I have a small field of vision and I only see color. The distances and layout of your house, the buttons on the dishwasher, the layout of your new neighborhood: you have to experience all that and learn it again. That will take a while. But now for the first time I feel a kind of peace coming over me.”