Illustration by Tatsuro Kiuchi

There is nothing quite like a cross-country road trip with your family. By the time we reached Niagara Falls, I had been in the car with my parents for two days, and we were all desperate to escape one another. So instead of plowing on eastward to New Hampshire, we got out of the car and, walking in opposite directions, hurried to put distance between us. It was mid-March, and the railings around the lookout points over the falls were coated in thick layers of smooth, opaque ice, like fogged glass. Leaning dangerously far over the safety rail, I gazed down at the thundering falls. The water plummeting to earth was breathtaking, but what captured my attention was the color of the pool below. It was like no water I had ever seen -- not blue like my Lake Michigan at home, or clear Caribbean aqua, or stormy gray like the North Sea by our summer cottage in Northumbria. This water was a dark, brilliant, emerald green, startingly serene. I consumed the color, inhaled it. I got high off green. 

Before returning to the car, I made a detour through the gift shop. Among the pyramids of "real" maple syrup, moose paperweights, and panoramic postcards, I found a jade maple leaf pendant, which my friends later informed me more closely resembled marijuana. The trinket itself was tacky, but the color leaped out at me. I ended up buying the necklace, not for its taste or craftsmanship but so that I could hold the color of the water in my hands.

When I was 6, I was diagnosed with a rare retinal disease called Stargaardt's and told that I would be blind by the age of 16. I grew up with the assumption that all of the beautiful things surrounding me would gradually fade and then, one day, disappear. I had stared at the water, knowing that I might never be back or, that if I did return, I would know only the low growl of the falls and the wet slipperiness of ice beneath my fingers. But on my 16th birthday, I vividly remember gloating in the brightness of each candle. I could still see. Seven years later, there is no knowing how long my vision will hold up. It may decline rapidly or remain stable for years. The fate of the beautiful things around me is, however, even less certain. 

Behind my home in Ellison Bay, Wisconsin, there was a wood. In spring, which does not come until late May, fallen trees were velvety with soft green moss, and wood violets perfumed the cold twilight with aching sweetness. In early summer the forest floor was an ocean of glossy dark green periwinkle leaves and violet-blue blossoms. To cross this ocean, I used to inch my way across a fallen birch trunk. When I wasn't hurrying to get to dinner before my older brothers ate everything, I would sit on the old log, dangling my feet in the cool leaves and silken petals. Peeling the papery thin bark from the log, I would study its secret blushed underside, which mirrored the streaming coral clouds that lingered in the treetops after sunset.

And then the land was sold by the neighbors, and a gravel road was cut through my woods. A chic summer cottage now stands where our rickety tree fort used to be. The woods beyond, with their maze of deer trails through trillium and wild strawberries, have been transformed into a massive complex of expensive condos.

Blindness, I thought, would rob me only of the visual impression of the things I loved: the flickering silver shadows of the quaking aspens, the pearly radiance of a snowy moonlit forest. I assumed I would still have the sound of the wind shaking the leaves and the fragrance of the frozen trees. But listening to the bulldozers grunting up the hill, I realized that they would take everything: sight, sound, touch, taste, and smell.

A narrow strip of trees remains at the bottom of our yard, and if I tilt my head to one side I can almost make the cottage disappear into my blind spot. But I can still hear the sound of car engines where before there was only hushed rustling and birdsong. I've never seen anything that captures the colors, scents, and sounds of my woods. I wish there were some way I could keep a little piece of it with me, like the jade pendant. For although I will continue to come back again and again to these woods, long before my sight is gone there may be nothing left to see.