Mondays with Margie

I am writing as fast as I can. The next episode will appear when it's ready.

Meanwhile life continues to unfold. Mondays with Margie have resumed, now that I no longer seem to be a carrier for virus droplets. Margie’s experience of angina is not chest pain but dizziness, and she laughs it off, “My doctor tells me to walk slowly, and I tell him that’s the only way I can walk.” 

“I like being here,” she says warmly, “and I know my job is to love everything and let it go. That’s the work of being 92.” Referring to Carolyn Heilbrun’s famous decision that 77 is long enough for a person to live, Margie said, “I don’t think I even understood what forgiveness meant before I was 78. I’d say the last 15 years of my life have been the richest. I wouldn’t give them up—for what? to prove I was in control? to save myself the humiliation of having to walk slowly? to hide the fact that I’ve become forgetful? Carolyn Heilbrun should have waited a little longer, so she could write a book called The Benefits of Living Past 77.”

Margie is reading Educated: A Memoir by Tara Westover, about a woman whose mentally ill father was a survivalist who refused to send his children to school. It took years for the author to realize that her parents were abusive and that abuse of children is considered by some people to be unacceptable. Margie says it’s a difficult book to read, very painful, but worth it because the point is, the woman got OUT of that situation. 

I’ve started a beautiful book, sitting on the table between us in this phone photo, called Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants, by Robin Wall Kimmerer. I thought of Ceridwen as soon as I started reading it. Here’s the opening paragraph:

Hold out your hands and let me lay upon them a sheaf of freshly picked sweetgrass, loose and flowing, like newly washed hair. Golden green and glossy above, the stems are banded with purple and white where they meet the ground. Hold the bundle up to your nose. Find the fragrance of honeyed vanilla over the scent of river water and black earth and you understand its scientific name: Hierochloe odorata, meaning the fragrant, holy grass. In our language it is called wiingaashk, the sweet-smelling hair of Mother Earth. Breathe it in and you start to remember things you didn’t know you’d forgotten.