When you are totally blind, as Sarah Smith is, and you're also a folk musician, dance and music teacher, graduate school student, advocate for people with disabilities and for guide dogs, soup kitchen volunteer, and occasional contra dance caller, gardener, and house builder, you have to organize your life very systematically. Smith, 53, is nothing if not systematic. Consider her house. She's lived on the top floor of this 200-year-old Georgian here in downtown Salem with her musician husband Bill for 23 years, ever since she lost her vision due to complications from diabetes. It's not the most user-friendly house for someone without vision: It has a steep staircase that takes a sharp right turn; compact rooms; and an uneven front sidewalk. Smith, however, has the logistics of her life down to a science. The furniture arrangement is, as she puts it, ''centrifugal.'' Everything is placed against the wall to minimize stumbling every chair, table, and musical instrument, ranging from her double bass to her husband's Appalachian dulcimer, banjos, mandolin and guitar. 'It's not that I don't want to hurt myself,'' she explains. ''It's just that I refuse to move slowly. And there are all those instruments I don't want to destroy.'' Every household object has its special place. Scissors must go in the scissors drawer, the day's mail always sits on one end of the kitchen table and migrates to a living room table after Bill has read it. Her guide dog's harness hangs just outside the front door, on the first hook. Spice bottles are alphabetically arranged on a kitchen shelf and labeled in braille. The Christmas tree goes in a corner and is decorated, as always, with ''a wonderful collection'' of ornaments friends have given them over the years. ''I love the tree for the smell, and also for the tactile part of it,'' says Smith. ''I can tell you volumes about each ornament.'' Smith's spirited, upbeat approach to living life with a disability was one of the reasons she became the subject of a new children's book, ''Looking Out for Sarah'' (Charlesbridge Publishing), by Cambridge writer and illustrator Glenna Lang. It is a picture book about a day in the life of a seeing-eye dog and his person, from the dog's point of view. (''Left, Perry,'' said Sarah. As they strode down the sidewalk, Perry pulled to the side to sniff a tasty crumb. He knew he shouldn't eat on the job, but he hoped Sarah wouldn't mind just once.'') 
Lang spent six months shadowing Smith. Her book depicts the way Perry, the guide dog, helps Smith maneuver around Salem and beyond, taking the train, meeting with friends, visiting an elementary school to sing for students and tell them about life with a guide dog. It describes how, in 1994, Sarah and Perry walked 300 miles to Manhattan to raise awareness about guide dogs and meet Mayor Rudolph Giuliani. Lang says she got the idea for the book ''many, many years ago. It was one of those ideas you carry around with you a long, long time.'' She interviewed several people with guide dogs and was immediately impressed with Smith's energy and good cheer. She ''fell in love'' with Perry, a black Labrador retriever. ''Sarah is charismatic and dynamic,'' says Lang. ''She is quite an inspiration. It's just amazing that someone in her situation is not at all slowed down, as far as I can see. I always forget that she's blind. She doesn't act blind. I know she can't read the book, but the amazing thing is I feel that she can. She really listens to what people have to say and has a full imagination.'' Sarah Smith was a strong presence in Salem even before there was a book about her. Part of it is her extroverted nature, her awareness and acceptance of the fact that people are fascinated by guide dogs, and her eagerness to talk about how they work together as a team. ''She's such an accessible person,'' says Eleanor Rubin, coordinator of access for the Museum of Fine Arts, where Smith is a member of the access advisory board. ''This summer, I took a walk with her through her neighborhood, and it was very slow going because everyone wanted to stop and say hello. She's a very distinctive figure.'' 
Smith, who is most comfortable in blue jeans or overalls, is aware that she and her dog make a handsome couple, and she's proud of it. (Her beloved Perry died a few months ago; her new guide dog, ''a great companion,'' is Garran.) ''There is a whole different feeling when you're going with a dog as opposed to poking along with a cane,'' says Smith. ''I feel like I'm on my own track. I'm really in charge, whereas with a cane I feel as though I'm basically tracing my way along from obstacle to obstacle. I never feel as proud; I feel self-conscious. But with such a handsome dog, I'm a world beater! We look fabulous!'' Another reason she's well known is that she moves in many circles, from volunteering at a local soup kitchen to calling contra dances, an activity for which she says she's perfectly suited: ''One thing I know about myself is that I'm very outgoing and I really like the limelight,'' she says. ''I was the middle kid in a boisterous family.'' She and her husband both sing and play a variety of instruments and perform traditional folk music at coffeehouses in the North Shore and at community events. Every other year, they produce and perform at Salem's ''Yuletide Festival,'' a celebration of the winter solstice that this year took place Dec. 9. Trained as a teacher, she works part time as an ''itinerant teacher'' of music and dance in North Shore schools. She is also, by her own definition, an ''overachiever'' and someone ''always charging into adventures,'' which is one of the reasons why she is helping her husband, a woodworker, build a new house on the coast of Maine. ''It's not like she's just supervising,'' says Lang. ''She's working with a hammer and nails, and doing the framing.'' It's also why she has recently undertaken one of the biggest challenges of her life: entering a master's degree program in social work at Salem State College. ''You know, last time I went to school, I could see,'' says Smith. ''My first year (of studying social work) was probably the hardest thing I've ever done. The first semester, I would cry twice a day.'' She says studying is slow and onerous, made possible by textbooks on tape, the assistance of ''the most generous people who read to me,'' the fact that she has an ''incredible memory,'' and technology. Salem State has given her access to a library database ''because it's easier to work at home.'' She also takes her exams at home, and sends them in by e-mail. She works in the upstairs office she calls her ''nerve center.'' Ascending the stairs gingerly (''Garran loves stuffed animals and sometimes drops them on the stairs.''), she welcomes a visitor into the office where her computer is outfitted with special text-to-speech translation software that reads her e-mails to her at high speed, though in an affectless drone. A person not dependent on such software easily might be irked by the monotony of the voice. Not Sarah Smith. ''I don't get sick of it,'' she says. ''It is such a gift. I don't resent it at all. The fact that it's not terribly well-inflected is nothing. '' She also counts her blessings. Yes, she is totally blind, lacking any sort of light perception. ''I travel in a totally dark world,'' as she puts it. But having lived both with vision and without it, she's discovered that ''vision robs people of other senses,'' like the rich sounds and smells they overlook because vision tends to overpower them. Having vision is ''like having a loud talker in the room,'' she says. ''My perception of the world is very, very vivid, except it doesn't include vision.'' She has resigned herself to her blindness through a combination of ''denial and acceptance.'' She has known depression from time to time, but in general she considers herself a ''happy hooligan.'' ''There are many, many terrible things that happen to people, and your life isn't over,'' she says. ''You don't have to fix everything. You realize you may have this extra baggage, but it doesn't have to be in front of you. It can be beside you.'' This story ran on page H1 of the Boston Globe on 12/20/2001.  Copyright 2001 Globe Newspaper Company.