I met Marietta in July of 2024 in a memory care community in Marietta, Ohio. Snowy hair, neatly dressed, she was 99 at the time. I asked if she was named after the town or if the town was named after her and she laughed.
Marietta told me she once worked in a bridal shop and still looks after herself. She told me she likes words. That was music to my ears, since I was there to introduce poemRENOVATION, my arts-based word challenge.
I put a bunch of word blocks on the table in front of her. She looked at each one like it was a new day.
“Let’s see, what goes with ‘tree?’ Where would ‘sister’ go?”
The joy she took in considering the enormous potential presented by each word reminded me of myself. I’m doing it right now, as I write this.
I took photos of Marietta grinning brightly beside the inspired run-on sentence she finally deemed to be her finished product. She asked if I would bring her more words.
Marietta became my spokesmodel. I put her smiling face on the postcards I made to promote poemRENOVATION. Her radiant image says everything I can’t find a written way to convey.
We were reunited in April, when she turned 100. Still smiling and neatly dressed, she looked smaller, more frail. She didn’t recognize me. Her hands were unsteady and she had a deep chest cough.
Marietta told me she had to go to the hospital to see her mother and then after that would go to school. She said her school was on 4th Street and was distressed when she couldn’t remember its name.
She brightened when I put word blocks down on the table in front of her—a scrambled snippet of Emily Dickinson’s “Hope is the thing with feathers.” I watched Marietta transform those words into possibilities.
“What pairs best with soul? Look, here is ‘perches.’ What perches?”
She arranged and rearranged nouns, verbs, pronouns, appreciating each like they were her children. She has no children, I was told, but there’s a nephew who comes to visit, and friends from the church she used to attend in town.
The following week, we worked with words from the first verse of the song “The Best Things in Life are Free.” She created this:
You are the sunbeams
To flowers in spring.
Robins are mine.
They shine, gleam.
The best, the stars for free there
Things that are life
The moon and me
They belong to everyone
Everyone sing
Those words inspired her to paint a bright yellow sunflower with a smaller one growing from its crown. We worked together to glue her poem beside the flowers. She signed her artwork in pencil, lamenting her shaking hand, then held her creation up, smiling, and asked if we could sing.
Last night I learned Marietta has died. I feel the ache in the place where all my words live. And at the same time, I feel the joyful desire to arrange one last bunch of words in her honor. Marietta, what word sounds nicest next to “sunbeam?” Which one goes best beside “goodbye?”