[et_pb_section fb_built="1" admin_label="section" _builder_version="4.16" global_colors_info="{}"][et_pb_row admin_label="row" _builder_version="4.16" background_size="initial" background_position="top_left" background_repeat="repeat" global_colors_info="{}"][et_pb_column type="4_4" _builder_version="4.16" custom_padding="|||" global_colors_info="{}" custom_padding__hover="|||"][et_pb_accordion _builder_version="4.19.1" _module_preset="default" hover_enabled="0" sticky_enabled="0"][/et_pb_accordion][et_pb_text _builder_version="4.19.1" _module_preset="default" hover_enabled="0" sticky_enabled="0"]The summer I was 13, I went to a religious camp, where we spent two weeks talking about Jesus and singing hymns. One night, we did an activity: We each took a piece of paper and wrote down the thing we were most afraid of. Then we put the papers into a big jug, and took turns drawing and reading someone else’s. As the kids drew and read, the same word was spoken again and again. “Death.” “Death.” “Death.” But when my best friend pulled a paper from the jug, she turned to me. She knew she’d drawn mine. “Don’t worry,” she whispered. “I won’t say what you wrote.” Every single person had written “Death.” Except me. But she didn’t want me to stand out. She wanted to protect me. And to be honest, I was grateful. When camp was over and I went home, I pulled out a volume of the World Book Encyclopedia, and said, “Okay, God. If you exist like everybody seems to think you do, then you will heal me.” I opened the heavy book to a page, and I couldn’t … and I couldn’t … and I couldn’t. I yelled and screamed, slammed the book shut and put it back on the shelf. I had written “Blindness” on that piece of paper. I’ve been losing my sight almost as long as I’ve been alive. There’s a photo of me taken around my first birthday, and people will say now that there seems to be something wrong with my eyes. I squinted a lot, and by two I was wearing glasses. My life soon became trips back and forth to the ophthalmologist, my parents’ whispers behind closed doors, books with large print in school, then special schools and learning Braille. Just as my older sister had been diagnosed a few earlier, I also inherited a recessive gene disorder called retinitis pigmentosa, a progressive narrowing then obliteration of the sight field. I grew up in a little town called Fair Bluff, in Columbus County, North Carolina, where stately homes lined the banks of the Lumber River. As a little girl, I remember riding down the street with my parents, seeing the river that passed the porches of these houses draped in Spanish moss and adorned in brilliant florals. We used to ride around the countryside too, to see all the farm animals and how tall the tobacco and the soybeans and corn were getting in the summertime. And it was on one of those rides when the sun broke through the clouds before the rain had completely stopped, and where, from the back seat, I saw my dad point through the windshield. “Look,” he said. “There’s a rainbow.” It was huge and each band of the spectrum was bright and defined, and the arc came all the way over and touched the ground in the cornfield. We all got out of the car and Mom was teasing Dad, as we trudged through the field, that we were all going to look for the pot of gold. What we found, though, was better…magical. Awestruck, we ran back and forth through the violet, the magenta, the yellow. It is a memory I return to, a memory of family and wonder, and of sight. In my mind’s eye, I can still see the Scott sign above the store my father owned, so big and bold in its colors and lettering, and the large block numbers beneath the entrance to the post office, where my dad and I went every night to get the mail. The change, the loss, was slow – and measurable. And eventually, on those family drives through town as I became older, gone were the black river, the blue azaleas and the white magnolias against the waxy green leaves. –Mary Ellen Scott[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column][/et_pb_row][/et_pb_section]