When you first see her, you feel like a sunny moon has entered the room, a gold and silvery presence with a soft voice, a willowy woman with a gentle presence and a gentle laugh. She bends her head to listen to you, making sure you know you have her attention. Because she is beautiful and holds herself well, you are captivated right away. As you speak with her, she engages your heart with her kindness. You feel like you could never come to harm by this woman. More than most kind people, she is fascinating. You hope to have the chance to experience this luminous person, find out who she really is.
Marilyn Strong. Perhaps that is how most of us perceived her upon meeting her. I did. How impressed I was with her. I think I first encountered her at “Passive 80,” the Second National Passive Solar Conference, held in Amherst in 1980, attended by 5,000 people, the “Solar Woodstock.” She and Steve were there, floating in their own little sea of celebrity. When I met her, her smile was genuine and she put up no wall. Of course I responded in kind. Over the decades, we drifted in the same solar currents, Mark’s and my work being in solar energy as well. And in Harvard, we got together sometimes. I watched her wielding hammer and saw at the house they were building in Still River, amazed that such an ethereal-looking being could whack the tools so well. I went to the concerts she organized at the Cronin. I rode the genuine merry-go-round horse she had at her house on Old Littleton Road and swung on her indoor swing. She had these things not just as ornaments, but to enjoy in play.
Listening and laughter
A talented RN, Marilyn was also a clown. What beautiful woman would joyfully don a red rubber nose and get goofy as she did? Someone with as much laughter in her as Marilyn, I suppose, if you could find such. Her clowning revealed a brilliant mind. She cheered up kids with cancer in hospitals. And she was really funny. When our daughter Jessamine was in Children’s Hospital with a brain tumor (not cancer, thank God), Marilyn made sure to show up, making us both laugh. She even gave Jessamine reiki. And many times she showed up after we got home, bringing medical insight and assistance. She would never have overlooked us.
Years later we decided, with several other couples, to build a little co-housing community in Vermont. When our group amicably dissolved, the Strongs decided to move up here to our neighborhood. Here in Vermont, I got to know her deeper self, understand her enormous altruism.
In the 35 years I knew her, Marilyn never failed to deliver on the promise of careful listening and special laughter that I experienced upon first meeting her. Never in all the times I saw her did I not respond to her as though a sunny moon had just entered the room.
Josie Carothers is a former Depot Road resident. She now lives in Randolph Center, Vermont.
