Dominikowa’s blindness

Dominikowa’s blindness is a continuing physical condition, not a complete withdrawal from work or household life. With her eyes bound, she still spins yarn by feeling whether the thread is thick or thin. Later, described as half blind and hobbling with a stick, she remains responsible for a farm whose demands are growing beyond what she can manage. Her impairment is woven into the daily labor and family strain of the household rather than treated as an isolated event.

A daily practice adapted to limited sight

When Jasio visits, he finds Dominikowa sitting outside her house spinning, a sight that surprises him because her eyes are bound. She explains that her fingers let her judge the thickness of the thread. The detail makes her work visible as an adaptation: sight is unavailable, but touch still permits her to carry on with a familiar task. Her pleasure at Jasio’s visit is also clear; she calls for Jagusia, who is working somewhere in the farmyard.

Impairment amid the farm’s decline

By the summer, Dominikowa is still half blind and now also hobbling with a stick. The household has become difficult to sustain: cows are sometimes sent to pasture unmilked, pigs go hungry, and horses chew at hayracks beside empty mangers. Work waits across the farm, from ploughing manure into the wheat strips to picking flax and tending potatoes, while fuel is scarce, tools are rusting, and harvest is approaching. The account places her limited sight and mobility alongside this accumulation of urgent labor, sharpening the practical strain on an older woman who cannot manage everything alone.

Family circumstances and significance

Dominikowa tries to meet the demands by rushing about herself, hiring a woman as a laborer, and urging her children to work. Jagusia does not respond to her pleas, while Jędrzych spends more time at Szymek’s and threatens to leave. His taunt that Szymek has a house, money, a woman, and a cow makes the family rupture part of the household’s economic crisis. Dominikowa’s blindness therefore coincides with, and intensifies, her difficulty holding together a farm and family whose other members are failing or refusing to share the work. The text gives no cause for her condition or prospect of recovery; it emphasizes the work she continues to do and the limits imposed by her body and circumstances.