This is a lesson in wearing eye protection. Taking care of your body, your outer shell for the time you spend on this planet. I have not yet learned this lesson. But I am listening. If you’re an artist or carver and your whole life depends on your vision, please read this.I am taking care of the garden a few weeks ago. Planting, mulching, weeding, pruning.
I am radically pruning the blackberry bush, big thick gloves and glasses. Cut, cut, and pile up the branches so I can burn them later. No use composting them, someone could get injured on the pile, looking for rabbits and snakes.
I am done this tedious job and turn away. Towards the trumpet flower vine, with its compound curving branches. When I get blinded by an explosion of light. One of the branch tips from the trumpet flower hits my glass lens, slides to the edge and proceeds to poke me in the eye, deeply.
I get over it in a few minutes. Eye looks ok. A few red veins, which is not unusual.
But the next morning. Oh, this is not normal. I am seeing a thousand dots, micro circles and this big blotch of black, floating in my vision. A bit like the black entity in the TV show Lost. When I try looking at it and it moves away, slightly out of your field of vision. Google it of course. They are called “eye floaters”. It’s blood inside your eyeball.
Being an emergency, we will squeeze you in at the end of the day. Quick visit to the eye doctor and a few photos later, he turns to me and says, he’s a joker, so I never take him seriously. He says that this is bad, beyond what he can do. Head tilt by myself. He’s not kidding. Makes me an appointment with the retinal specialist in the city, for the next day.
This second doctor proceeds to take multiple images, again, and gets frantic about fixing this right away, before the retina collapses. When poked, the retina can collapse at any time, even months or years after the accident, then you are blind!
Luckily for me, the laser specialist, a third doctor, is in the office today, he only comes to the island once a month. I am super lucky. All sci-fi laser work is done within a few hours of my appointment.

Conclusion: Wear your dorky safety glasses.

So: Where does this salmon come in? The eye floater looked like a salmon, curved in on itself, as if sweeping the riverbottom pebbles to make a nest. The eye floater was burned in my vision for about a month, till it faded away. Voilà.
Feene

Salmon tessellation by Francine Champagne ©2016

Below, the zoomed-out version.

Salmon tessellation by Francine Champagne ©2016

2018-10-18; I did try a colour variation on this one, not too much. Kind of like the original one best.

Salmon tessellation by Francine Champagne ©2016

Salmon tessellation by Francine Champagne ©2016