Sister connection: Reading between the words

By Andrea Thelin 

My little sister, the youngest of seven siblings, has Down Syndrome.

She is 47 years old and lives in a supervised setting and is very happy with her life. She has a job, lots of friends and a full social calendar.

I received a letter from her one morning. When I pulled it out of our mailbox, I was amazed that it even made it to me.

Her handwriting is very difficult to read. Usually when she sends us things, the address is written by the staff that takes care of her. This letter arrived in a long business envelope with six Elvis stamps pasted across the top. The address was made out by her tiny, wrinkled, Down Syndrome hands.

I opened the envelope and two scraps of paper fell out. They were approximately 4″ by 4″ in size. She made sure she didn’t waste any of paper by not leaving any space between her words.

I could picture her, carefully ripping, (not cutting), the paper out of her notebook and thinking about what to write. She didn’t use excess ink on words such as “the,” “and” and “is.” The note was mainly nouns, verbs and a few pronouns thrown in for good measure. She trusted me to fill in the blanks.

...read the full article, and others like it at: http://edgemagazine.net/2012/05/sister-connection-reading-between-the-words/