Margot, ray of pink sunshine

My friend Margot passed away this week.

Thinking back on our time together, I'm realizing Margot was a member of my pandemic pod. I wouldn't have called it that at the time because for me the term conjures up images of 20/30-somethings in the city picnicking, playing board games, drinking wine in puffers in dining igloos. But the pandemic pod was definitionally a small group of people who decided to isolate together: a "small, self-contained network[s] of people who limit their non-distanced social interaction to one another". As such, my pod was Peter, his parents, Peter's aunt, and finally, Margot; an older crew of a very different lifestyle and life experience from ours, with whom we settled in almost too cozily for a year and a half.

Upon meeting, Margot and I immediately fell in love: she, a person who lives to delight, and me, a person who lives to be delighted. Our conversations would devolve into exchanges of charm and giggles. I called her my personal Miss Frizzle.

The first summer of the pandemic, I discovered and became addicted to weeding. In my frustration and despair at the time, all I wanted to do was pull things out of the ground. Luckily, her beautiful, bountiful, wild garden had an abundance of things both wanted and unwanted growing in it. 

margot's kitchen, margot's garden

One of my fondest memories with her was the afternoon we spent weeding the mint that had overrun her garden; a satisfying weeding session which she paid for in cookies, tea, convo, and cuddles with her giant poodle mix.

I got my first and only tick while gardening with her

Picking berries at her house; an activity I had only ever read about in books. It felt like the realization of some bookish girly dream 

That first summer, she learned I was craving bok choy and that I wasn't seeing it at the local Connecticut grocery store. There probably were easier ways of getting my hands on the vegetable, but she went ahead and cultivated a beautiful crop just for me ❤️

Margot was also the queen of the dinner party: a facilitator of lively, funny convo as well as master maker and baker of delicious food and sweets. One of my favorites in her repertory: the story of how the accent she was born with wasn't good enough for stratified English society, and the resulting drilling she had to do to obtain a "proper" accent. As she told the story, she would swerve musically between accents, her journey and story filled with mischievous relapses, examples of her speech pre- and post-refinement.

If conversation dulled for even a moment, she would identify someone, and ask them a hopelessly big question to pull them in and set the night off again: "so Peter:" *pause* "why do you think people are so taken with Trump?"

She pulled me aside once and asked me seriously yet mischievously why me and Peter hadn't gotten married yet. And then asked if she'd be invited (to which I said of course !!!). When we eventually got engaged, she gave us a lush, abundant bouquet of roses as well as her giddiest enthusiasm as congratulations.

One of the last times I saw her was at a fundraiser she was hosting. She served the most beautiful paella I've ever seen/had.

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Margot, we loved you and your garden and the food you made and your amazing clothing and jewelry and the way you worked a dinner table conversation and the way you made everyone feel about 100x better than before they saw you. I am missing you already and was just thinking this week how happy I was going to be to see you in June, following up on a promise I made you 4 years ago. I know you'll be smiling down on us, and that brings me comfort and warmth🌻

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