It's 6 a.m., gray and still. Thelma Wright, a sparrow-sized woman of 77, sits on the back step watching the light arrive. Overhead two purple finches circle.

For early industry, Thelma often beats the birds. Up at midnight to care for her husband, Wilbur, she seldom drops back to sleep. Instead she scrubs the bathtub or dusts a few shelves. In the ten years since Wilbur's stroke, she's had little time for chores in daylight.

Indoors, there is a bit of sparrow in her movements, a plucky hip-hop that reveals arthritic joints. On the kitchen counter, the coffee machine gurgles. Thelma peers at it through her thick-lensed glasses. By instinct more than sight, she navigates the familiar kitchen spaces, cupboard to refrigerator to drawer, mixing Wilbur's strawberry drink, carrying his bran flakes and white-scalloped bowl to the table.

When Thelma enters the front bedroom, the clock on the mantle ticks toward seven. In the post bed, her husband's breath puffs in-out, in-out, his eyes closed.

From an apparent sound sleep, Wilbur says, "I'm awake."

Thelma smiles.

Wilbur loves to surprise me. When we were newlyweds out grocery shopping, he'd ask if I liked this or that or the other. Then it got so each week when he'd empty the bags, he'd say, "Here's a little surprise for you." It didn't have to be a whole lot, maybe a small box of candy or a can of something. But it meant so much.

Two years ago at Christmas time I came home one evening, and here in the living room sat this darling red Flyerwagon. Wilbur knows I love wagons?buckboards, flatbeds, any kind. I have a miniature collection I call the Livery Stable. So when Wilbur saw an advertisement, he had our son get it as a surprise. I think I'm the only grandmother in the world that got a red wagon for Christmas.

"I'll get your washcloth and eyedrops," says Thelma.

One-handed, Wilbur rubs the wet warmth over his face. Since 1961, when his left arm was severed in an industrial accident, Wilbur has done everything one-handed. Then six months ago, another vacancy: Poor circulation reduced his right foot to pain so incessant the leg was amputated. Home from the hospital, Wilbur looked himself over. On the left, one leg, paralyzed; on the right, one strong arm, one stump, plus five phantom toes that still burned at night like a row of blue flames.

"There really isn't much of me left, is there?" he said one day.

"Hey, buddy," replied Thelma, patting his chest. "The best part is right here."

Washing done, Thelma fishes a white tube sock from the armoire, peels one from Wilbur's foot and rolls on the clean one. Both are cropped at the ankle to eliminate the ring of elastic that would slow blood flow. "Ready to get up?"

Wilbur nods.

How to move the inertia of paralysis, that is the problem. Enter the Hoyer lift, a machine that makes a workable marriage of chrome and nylon, strength joined to flexibility. Via the Hoyer, a featherweight like Thelma can move mountains.

"One of these days," says Wilbur, "I'm going to get up and give you a ride in that machine." He reaches for a rope handle attached to the opposite side of the bed and rolls onto his side. On the sheet Thelma spreads a nylon mesh sling and rolls Wilbur back on it. Twice she travels the double-bed width to straighten the sling, peering through the glaucoma that tunnels her vision, then rolling the huge horseshoe base of the Hoyer under the bed. Over Wilbur's head, two double chains swing from the A-shaped boom, faintly tinkling.

Wilbur's eyes follow Thelma the way iron filings follow a magnet. She treks around the bed again, hooking the chains into four eyelets on the sling, two at his shoulders, two at his hips. As Thelma pumps the hydraulic lever on the hoist, her husband's shoulders rise from the bed like a slow updraft.