Boston Globe - Peggy Freydberg

If Peggy had died at 100, would anyone outside of her family & Martha's Vineyard circle have known?  My deepest thanks to Nancy Aronie for introducing me to this beyond description woman, a role model & mentor for all who wish to grow up in old age...

Excerpt from her Boston Globe obituary, worth the full read:

Mrs. Freydberg, who lived in Chilmark and died March 27 at 107, offered readers a different view of the Vineyard and even the weather through the lens of poems such as "Blizzard": 

It takes courage to see beauty
in a world spread deep and silent
with interminable whiteness;
and to keep on being awed
by such uncommon splendor
while trying to suppress
a fundamental fear
of being buried by it.

But know it as it is:
Beauty is everlasting.
And winter’s burial is not.
Underneath cold winter bone,
the flesh of summer sleeps.
 
Margaret Howe Freydberg, whose health declined after she fell at home this winter, moved to the Vineyard full time in 1968 with her second husband, Nicholas Freydberg. Her house overlooked Stonewall Pond and was a quiet escape for many family members, a place her grandchildren and great-grandchildren spent parts of the summer, and where many went in times of trouble.

* * * * * *

In the 1920s, she married Samuel Sloan, a literary scout for a New York City publishing house, and their travels for pleasure and work eventually took them to France. “We moved to Paris because Sam’s job was to find French authors,” Mrs. Freydberg told the Vineyard Gazette in 2012. She began writing descriptions of her life in France and published her work in the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle. 

After the couple returned to New York, Samuel Sloan helped found the publishing house Duell, Sloan and Pearce. 

“Her younger time was like the ‘Great Gatsby’ era, but she hated talking about it,” Tamara said. “She must have had a blast in the moment, but she never liked to look back.”

The couple had a son, Samuel Sloan, who now lives in Santa Fe, N.M., and a daughter, Laidily MacBride, who lives in Baltimore.

“Her eyes were just fascinating, the way they sparkled,” her son recalled. “I don’t know how she did that.”

After Mrs. Freydberg’s first husband died in 1945, she worked as an editor at his publishing house and lived in Yorktown Heights, N.Y., where she met and married Nicholas Freydberg. 

“They had a tremendously affectionate relationship,” her son said, adding that Nicholas Freydberg “was very supportive of her work.”

The marriage “was a fabulous match — she grew a lot more with Nick,” Sloan said. “She fully blossomed into her life with a full sense of self. . . . It was so important to her.”


* * * * * *


Using music as a metaphor, Mrs. Freydberg wrote about her affection for her second husband in "Falling in Love," which begins “What kind of an instrument was I” and includes the lines:

I could have called myself a Stradivarius,
for though I, of course, was just an ordinary violin,
waiting,
ready to be held for the first time in a musician’s hands,
primed to be played,
mobilized by all my busy genes
to become music –
when first I felt the quiver
of its stirring sound,
I became, imparadised,
the most priceless stringed instrument
on the face of the earth.


* * * * * *

(Tamara) Sloan said her grandmother was in her 90s when she turned to poetry: “She told me, ‘I still need to express myself, but I can’t pull off another novel.’ So she went for short-form poetry and was very good at it.” 

 

Credits:
1) mvmagazine.com
2) myartsandideas.com