Bathing in the details

“The great thing about living to be so old,” Margie told me this morning, “is that you finally have time to appreciate the small things in detail. You take time to just bathe in details you never saw before. I love to watch the edges of the clouds, the light coming and going along the edges, sometimes it’s almost like lace. Other days there’s fog or mist, and that softens everything. I look to see how far I can see, which buildings seem to dissolve, how far or how close the dissolving point is. It’s magical. It’s always changing. And the tiny urban hummingbirds that visit my eleventh-floor feeders—each one is colored differently from the others. I text my daughter Lucy when she’s at work, ‘You ought to see THIS one’s feathers,’ I’ll say. One has more green, another more purple, and as they move in the light, the green can turn bluish and then purple. I ask, at what point does green become purple? I love it all. I’m still here, what a miracle. I get to see this. And this. And this next thing. And instead of being busy busy busy rushing off to the next appointment, the next activity, the next tick on the calendar, I spend time with these small things, and it’s perfect. It’s a delicious privilege to be able to pay attention to the world in this slow way. All the years I was working, raising the children as a single mom, I never had time. Now I have time.” She marvels at it.

“I never thought I could be satisfied to spend time in an apartment, looking out the window. I thought that would be no life at all, I thought I would be bored to tears. I saw other people getting old and moving around less, and I felt sorry for them. But the gifts that appear are stunning, and I’m never bored at all. I have always loved nature, it has always been my best nourishment. But I don’t know if I ever took the time to see it till after I turned ninety.”

I loved hearing this, and I made this portrait of her by the coffee shop window while she was talking about her delight in having time to look out the window. I almost didn’t tell her the sad news of the verdict in the court case of the young "Dreamer" who is currently a school teacher. He is set to be deported, separated from his daughter, probably for life. Margie hasn’t met him, but she knows him through me, and she was hoping for him to be allowed to stay in the USA, as were many of you. I did tell her, though, because she wanted to know. His lawyer says they will appeal….

P.S. I have just been reminded by Saffi and FolkieBooknerd that it is Holocaust Remembrance Day. How fitting that my blip is Margie, whose Jewish parents came to the Bronx, New York, from shtetls in Russia and Poland. I'm so glad they escaped.