Questions I'd Like to Ask M

Subject line just in from Mr. Patrick David, in my spam box: "OPEN THE ATTACHMENT AND GET BACK TO ME." No problemo, Patty. I'll just click on your bonny attachment and wait for your call.

I'm feeling pretty good at the moment because I just finished a feature article on the Town and Garden Country Club (it's their 60th anniversary); the sheer weight of information and expectation was hanging over my head like an anvil. So I began to chip away, evah so slowly, remembering all the while that tomorra is anutha day. . .and now it's done! Hallelujah! The first draft was so boring that Martin fainted into a deep sleep while reading it, but the second and final draft moves along at a crisp pace and even I am still interested when I read it.

Two people in particular fascinated me. The first was a woman in her mid 90's who has spent her life saving and then giving money (along with her husband) to colleges and other worthy institutions. Sitting in this woman's modest home, you would never guess the astounding amount of funds this woman and her husband have given away. I didn't see many ornaments in her home besides a vase her mother had painted, a painting she had done of bearded irises, and a pretty table runner she sewed. Her husband built the house and they have lived there for sixty years. She sat in the sunporch, laughing and chatting with me, light catching the plant next to her elbow. She described the sacrifices her father (who worked at a coal mine) and her family made to send him, and then herself and her brothers, to college. She was handing over all her extra pocket change to the bank teller when she was a kid, depositing it in her education account that would grow sufficiently over the years to send her to college and to graduate school at Duke. She was married during World War II, and seventeen days after the wedding, her husband, who had already returned to the service, was sent to Africa. For two and a half years.

Before I left she told me how she had taken a small handful of hollyhock seeds, planted and watered them in a box. All winter she watched the tiny stems unfold: two, three, four leaves. They bloom in a bright, majestic row in her garden this summer.

Though she is almost 101 and can't talk or hear much anymore (so I didn't get to meet her), M, another woman, intrigued me. She earned a degree in home economics, never married, and worked 19-hour days operating a ferry boat (it was part of an inheritance), a rough task that involved unsticking the ferry when needed and transporting miners across the river and back. In the photo, her face is exquisite: creamy skin and movie-star eyes, a hat turned back so she could see where the boat was headed. Amazing. The woman who visited and told me about M mentioned that M's eyes are still as beautiful and as captivating as they were when she was a young woman with an inherited ferry boat and endlessly long days in front of her. And I want to ask her a whole book of questions, want to hear her voice rising and falling as she explains what her life was like, why she persevered, if she enjoyed her job, whom she met, if she would do it all over again if she had the chance.

Before I change into my jammas, something I am anticipating with glee, I will give you a quick update on Merwin. Seen, once, at 7:00 as I sauteed onions, skipping with umbrella in paw from the kitchen cart under the piano. He was wearing a fake glasses/nose combo, but I recognized him, all right. Tomorrow, the trap comes.