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Adelia M. Hoyt memoir and photographs
Page 10
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10 UNFOLDING YEARS but so slowly that not even I, much less those about me, realized how little I could see. I had practised a regular form of deception which fooled even those nearest to me. I was sent on errands to neighbors or to the men working in the fields, and I had to use every art I could devise to find my way. As I think back on some of these adventures I marvel that I did not sometimes come to grief. Surely some kind of providence watched over me and kept me from harm. I only had to hear something read once or twice to know it by heart, and guided by pictures or big head lines I could make a pretence of reading. As I have said we went quite regularly to church and Sunday School. After the sermon I would find my way unaided to my class. Holding the Quarterly like the others I would read my verse in my turn like the rest, it having been read to me at home. There were times when everything was obscured by a thick smoke-like mist before my eyes; then this would clear away and I could see quite distinctly. Sometime during those years my father took me to see a new doctor in Cedar Falls. We climbed a long flight of stairs to his office, and I was put through a lot of tests where I fear even my cleverness at make-believe failed to fool this doctor. As last we turned to my father and said: "Mr. Hoyt, I did not know you had a blind child." I can still hear the pain in my father's voice as he replied: "We don't call her blind." As we rode home, silent for the most part, there was a great ache in my heart, not for the little girl sitting there but for the man beside her whose hurt I seemed to feel far more than my own. Youth and ignorance mercifully kept me from realizing the full meaning of the word "blind," but I knew that it hurt my father whom I loved so dearly. I resolved then and there that in some way or other I would make it up to him. If in these pages I seem to speak more of my father than of my mother, it is not because I loved him more. Father and I were much alike and seemed to understand each other. Mother had her other three girls, and while father had been a real father to them, and I am sure he loved Emma as if she were his own,
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10 UNFOLDING YEARS but so slowly that not even I, much less those about me, realized how little I could see. I had practised a regular form of deception which fooled even those nearest to me. I was sent on errands to neighbors or to the men working in the fields, and I had to use every art I could devise to find my way. As I think back on some of these adventures I marvel that I did not sometimes come to grief. Surely some kind of providence watched over me and kept me from harm. I only had to hear something read once or twice to know it by heart, and guided by pictures or big head lines I could make a pretence of reading. As I have said we went quite regularly to church and Sunday School. After the sermon I would find my way unaided to my class. Holding the Quarterly like the others I would read my verse in my turn like the rest, it having been read to me at home. There were times when everything was obscured by a thick smoke-like mist before my eyes; then this would clear away and I could see quite distinctly. Sometime during those years my father took me to see a new doctor in Cedar Falls. We climbed a long flight of stairs to his office, and I was put through a lot of tests where I fear even my cleverness at make-believe failed to fool this doctor. As last we turned to my father and said: "Mr. Hoyt, I did not know you had a blind child." I can still hear the pain in my father's voice as he replied: "We don't call her blind." As we rode home, silent for the most part, there was a great ache in my heart, not for the little girl sitting there but for the man beside her whose hurt I seemed to feel far more than my own. Youth and ignorance mercifully kept me from realizing the full meaning of the word "blind," but I knew that it hurt my father whom I loved so dearly. I resolved then and there that in some way or other I would make it up to him. If in these pages I seem to speak more of my father than of my mother, it is not because I loved him more. Father and I were much alike and seemed to understand each other. Mother had her other three girls, and while father had been a real father to them, and I am sure he loved Emma as if she were his own,
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