Last night, my parents and Taylor went to hear a talk by the first blind man to reach the summit of Mt. Everest. This accomplishment is pretty near unfathomable in my mind, but it happened just the same. It just goes to show that almost anything is possible if you put your mind to it. Taylor shows the kind of spirit and strength it'll take to get through this life without her vision, assuming she's granted that opportunity. When I stopped by to pick up Mom for a quick walk at the Y tonight (we've had a cold snap here in Charlotte, and we thought the dogs might freeze to death on our normal route through the neighborhood), T was sitting at the kitchen table, finishing up her keyboarding homework. She has an external keyboard with raised dots on several keys and a software program called WordQ that says the words aloud after she types them. As I watched, she effortlessly spelled "Dad" and "bills" and several other words, words that would be a breeze for most sighted kids in this day and age, but the relative ease with which my sister found the keys just made me smile and shake my head. Her laughs when the program went back and pronounced the gibberish she'd typed at the beginning of the exercise were even sweeter.

By all accounts, T is doing great in school this year, and she seems so happy. At times this fall, it's almost seemed as if the sky is falling because of other events that have happened to our family, events not necessarily caused by Batten Disease but affected by it just the same. Taylor's illness touches every corner, every nook and cranny of our world. It's impossible to escape it, and it makes other hardships more difficult to endure. But T always finds a way to put everything in perspective for me, whether she realizes it or not. T may never "see" the part of the world where the highest peaks in the Himalayas reach up to touch the heavens, but she's climbing her Mt. Everest right now, even as she sleeps. She's climbing it with more ease than am I; in fact, she is my guide.