Helen Keller was able to see and hear at birth. She had even learned to say words like "water" by the time she became ill at the age of nineteen months. Helen's first nineteen months of sight, sound and speech represent a significant star in her constellation because they eventually helped her create a bridge between her world of darkness and a world of knowledge.
"... during the first nineteen months of my life I had caught glimpses of broad, green fields, a luminous sky, trees and flowers which the darkness that followed could not wholly blot out."
(p. 3-4) The Story of My Life by Helen Keller. Dover Publications, 1996. Originally published by Doubleday, 1903.