When Sarah Perry Hurlbert was 17, she took a job caring for a 90-year-old man in a foster home. Already she was patient, kind, nurturing and watchful. Her employers at the long-term care facility in Cherryfield noticed. Then, two weeks into the work, the man died, but Hurlbert’s employers were reluctant to lose the Addison native as a worker. They had already seen something extraordinary in the girl’s behavior.

“Sarah was able to see the possibilities, not the impossibilities,” said Alice Duston, owner of Duston Foster Home in Cherryfield, where Hurlbert tends to developmentally disabled and physically handicapped twin brothers in their 50s. “She always looks toward the highest quality of life for those in her care. She treats them like they’re her family, like they are the most special people in her life. And she does that with intuitiveness, innovation and initiative. Sarah has a gift.”

That gift is not officially noted on the master’s degree in occupational therapy that Husson College will confer upon Hurlbert today at commencement ceremonies in Bangor.

But the degree is a testament to a young woman’s independence and ambition. Hurlbert, who is 23, is the first member of her immediate family – her mother has a cleaning business, her father is an excavator and also manages blueberry fields in Washington County – to graduate from college. She worked up to 70 hours a week in the summer to pay for her own education including undergraduate and graduate degrees at Husson. In a car she purchased with her own money, she drove to Bangor each week for the last five years, first from Addison, where her parents live, and then from Harrington, where she and her husband Mark began their married life last year. Every weekend she went home to be with her family.

In the midst of this flurry of study, employment and road time, she has lost nearly 100 pounds – not from stress but out of a desire to be healthy. But being svelte isn’t her only reward. Last year, she received the 2006 Excellence in Long-Term Care Award from the Maine Long-Term Care Ombudsman Program, an Augusta-based advocacy project for consumers.

“Sarah is a rare person,” said Brenda Gallant, the state ombudsman for the program. “She exemplifies all of the award criteria: dedication, leadership, caring, maturity, kindness and patience.”

Ask Hurlbert’s instructors at Husson, and the refrain is the same. She contributes powerfully to what administrators call an outstanding class of 12 students this year with master’s degrees in occupational therapy. Because the profession is so underpopulated in Maine, all of the graduates are likely to find handsomely paid positions immediately.

Hurlbert is no exception. In July, she will begin her professional life at Bangor Nursing and Rehabilitation Center. Her training, but also her questing nature will serve her well, say those who have followed her accomplishments.

“If Sarah doesn’t have the answer, she’s going to find it,” said Cathy White, clinical coordinator for occupational therapy at the college. “That’s the compassion and caring part. She will always look for whatever treatment is best for her clients. If I were going to have someone be my practitioner, I would love to have Sarah.”

One need only spend an afternoon watching Hurlbert with Andy and Ricky Smith, the twin brothers in Cherryfield, to see her gifts in action. On a typical day, Hurlbert arrives for a shift and greets the men, who are blind, with hugs and kisses. Often in the course of an evening, she will tenderly take their hands into her own or stroke their foreheads in quiet reflection. She asks them about their days, quizzes them about meals, and settles into the evening hours that may include reading books, preparing dinner, watching TV, bathing, saying prayers and simply being present to assist her companions.

And companions is the right word. Even better is family. Hurlbert brings medical training to the job, but she also brings a deeper intuition about ties that bind, the roots that cling. Her own upbringing included individual attention from a stay-at-home mother and a hard-working father, who put his daughter behind the wheel of a tractor while he followed, hoisting rocks into the back bed. Early on, the young Sarah took the initiative to care for her own elderly grandmother and was vigilant during school days about her younger sister’s epilepsy

“When Sarah was a little girl, I knew she would go into the medical field,” said her mother Laurie Perry. “She was such a caring person.”

“When she was young, wherever you took her, she made eye contact,” said Leon Perry, her father.

Hurlbert offers the Smiths the same loving attention granted to her by her own family. She helps Andy, a cheerfully extroverted conversationalist, make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich or walk down a long driveway to get the newspaper every morning. She takes Ricky, who needs help walking, to Ellsworth each week for a lunch of hamburgers and French fries or shopping at big-box stores. Once, she and another personal care giver took the brothers on an overnight camping trip with a cookout, songs around the fire and s’mores.

“I fell in love with Andy and Ricky right from the start,” said Hurlbert. “They’re infectious. I’ve learned more from them than I have learned from anybody else in my entire life. Every morning when Andy gets the newspaper he stops to feel the snow or to put his chin up toward the sun. The rest of us take something like this and so many other things for granted.”

When Sarah and Mark got married last summer at the same church where the Perrys exchanged their vows more than two decades earlier, there was a small pause when the officiating minister asked who would be giving Sarah away. Leon Perry answered: “Her mother and I, and Ricky and Andy. Right, Andy?” Andy, who was sitting in the congregation, stood up and shouted, “Right!” Later at the reception, Andy and Sarah danced together to the 1970s disco hit “Get Down Tonight.” They brought down the house. And brought up a few tears of joy, too.

A few weeks ago, Hurlbert played the wedding video for visitors, and Andy listened attentively to the music, his chin jutting upward with concentration. Ricky was in another room listening to a recording of a Harry Potter book.

“Do you remember that, Andy?” Hurlbert asked, as the video showed her wedding dress twirling in the music and Andy jigging in his pink tie and sports coat.

“Yeah!” Andy answered.

“You looked so handsome,” she whispered.

“Handsome!” Andy said in his halting speech pattern. “Yeah!”

“I never thought of this as a job,” said Hurlbert later. “I get paid to do it, and I guess that’s a perk. But to me it’s like coming home.”

Alice Duston will tell you that the entire staff at the foster home has a stake in creating a high quality of life for the brothers, who were previously institutionalized for 20 years and are now beloved in the Cherryfield residence and community. She will also say that Hurlbert has played a major role in rejuvenating the brothers to expect a dignified and respected life, a daily world in which they have a say.

“Their good lives have a lot to do with Sarah,” said Duston. “At the beginning, I gave her this guidance: Let them do what they want because they deserve it. Sarah would talk to them. Her approach is: Let’s see what we can do to provide the very best life for them. She would think about things to do, think about what they would benefit from – whether it was a game or reading a book. And it wasn’t just any book. She would always look for books that interested them. Then she would talk to them about the books. I wanted higher standards for these guys, and she got that. It’s a special person who can see what’s in a person and pull it out. She did.”

Hurlbert has another month of clinical practice before she begins her new job. She and Mark have rented a trailer in Ellsworth, where he works as a plumber. It’s close to Addison, where her parents and sister still live. It’s close to the clam flats where Mark seasonally digs. And to their friends, many of them from Narraguagus High School, where the Hurlberts met.

Of course, part of the pull back to Cherryfield will be Andy and Ricky Smith. As her professional life launches, she realizes more than ever that her connection to these men runs deep, that she was young when it was forged and that the emotional attachments will – and should – be unique in her career.

Even as Hurlbert marches forward today, she does not see herself as graduating from the two men who have shaped her heart and her profession. She plans to continue working at Duston Foster Home one evening a week, and looks forward to someday having children who will also consider the Smiths family.

“Ricky and Andy are two of my best friends,” she said. “They will never be out of my life ever.”