Live Performances

Every Tuesday in January (1/6, 13, 20, 27) 6-9 PM solo at The Taos Inn, Taos NM

Sunday January 18 6-9 PM The Serpent Herders at The Taos Inn, Taos NM

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Musings – My Friend Marsha

Ahh…a new year. I actually resonate more with Winter Solstice, as celebrating the return to the light makes more sense to my Pagan heart. But still, the new year seems a natural time to take stock of the last 365 days. For a lot of us, 2025 was full of challenges and losses. Rather than give you a laundry list of mine, I’m going to tell you about my friend Marsha.

I met Marsha a few years ago when I was working at the Questa Library. She was a volunteer who came in every Tuesday afternoon, armed herself with a feather duster, and made her rounds of the whole building, perusing books as she went along. She’d spend an hour or so dusting and end up back at the circulation desk with a stack of books to check out, which I would do as she rinsed her feather duster and hung it to dry so it would be ready for her the following week. As time went by we got to chatting when she was done, and we slowly became friends.

Marsha was a prolific artist. Her paintings were hung in galleries and museums, and she created costumes and sets for John Cage and Merce Cunningham. She focused on abstracts and told me she used the I Ching to inform her work. She would bring new paintings to show me, and she always asked how my music was going. Marsha was passionate about the creative process and we often talked about our respective art forms and what inspired us. She got a kick out of the fact that I didn’t know anything about painting, and due to hearing loss she couldn’t understand any of the lyrics to my songs, but we were able to bypass the specifics and still have a meaningful conversation. One time when I was at her house she let me pick out one of her paintings. She set out several for me to choose from, and said the one I picked was the one she would have picked for me. She strongly suggested I have it professionally framed and even told me what color mat she thought would work best. To me, the painting looks like the moon, and I love it.

We also shared a love of books. Every week when Marsha came in for her dusting duties she’d return the titles she had checked out the week before and give me reviews of them. She had eclectic taste; she might read a book by Thich Nhat Hanh, a biography of John Adams, and a Danielle Steele romance novel in the same week. She was very opinionated and didn’t hesitate to tell me when she didn’t like a book, even if it was one I recommended to her. She also loaned me books out of her personal collection that she thought I needed to read. Sometimes they were over my head, but I always gave it a try because I knew I’d be expected to report back the following week.

Marsha was a staunch luddite. She didn’t own a cell phone or a computer. She did have an email address but always needed help using the library computers to access it, and mostly she just didn’t bother. She was an animal lover, although she limited herself to cats. She would tell me stories about her cats’ shenanigans, and she always asked me about my animals. The way she talked about my dog Gus and my horse Zephyr you would think they were old friends of hers. Every time I told her a story about something funny or cute or clever the did, she would say “isn’t that marvelous?” with a little laugh.

Early in 2025, the library suffered a major flood and was closed for several months. Marsha’s dusting duties came to an abrupt end, and I stopped working there to help my mom deal with some major health issues. So our friendship shifted, but we stayed in touch. I’d go to Marsha’s house for tea or a glass of wine every few weeks. We still talked about art and books and animals, and she’d tell me stories about her life in Taos – working at the Taos Bookshop and the Taos Inn and the Mabel Dodge Lujan house, living in someone’s garage in Talpa, and always being part of the art scene.

Marsha started receiving hospice care several months ago at the suggestion of her doctor and considered it a blessing. She didn’t have any family to help her and found navigating the medical establishment bewildering. Once hospice stepped in she had her oxygen equipment monitored and medications delivered straight to her doorstep. It was a huge relief to her.

She called me in mid-November after we hadn’t talked for a few weeks, and I was so happy to see her name come up on the caller ID. We caught up for a few minutes, and then she said, “I don’t really know how to say this, but I’m leaving.”

“Where are you going?” I asked her.

“I’m going to die,” she said. Oh. Silence for a minute. Then she told me she wanted to see me to say goodbye. She’d had her big down coat cleaned and wanted to give it to me. She was always worried that I wasn’t warm enough. I was stunned, but we made a date for the following week and ended the call.

As the day got nearer I got more and more anxious. I didn’t know what to say, and I didn’t know how I’d react to seeing her, knowing it would be the last time. I worried I’d say the wrong thing, act the wrong way. I took along a thermos of strong black tea and a bottle of whiskey, a combination she introduced me to another time at her house.

It turns out I didn’t need to say much. She was in the mood to reminisce, and she told me stories about her life that I’d never heard before. She told me about the plans she had made for her house and her cat. When we were done sipping our tea and whiskey she told me to rinse out the tea cups and take them home.

We walked into her bedroom where she had her coat laying out on her bed, encased in plastic from the cleaners. She held it up to me, satisfied that it would fit, and pushed it into my arms. Then she walked me to the door, hugged me for a long time, and I left.

At some point during our conversation that afternoon, I asked her how she was feeling about her decision to go the route of assisted dying.

“You know,” she said, “I’m not afraid. The only thing that makes it hard is that I love it all so much.”

https://www.riverafamilyfuneralhome.com/obituaries/marsha-skinner

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miscellaney

~ My friend Kiersten turned me on to this app a few months ago and I love it…turns out I’m not the only one

~ recent reads (and listens) – Broken Country by Clare Leslie Hall, A Woman Among Wolves by Diane Boyd, This is the Story of a Happy Marriage by Ann Patchett, Beartooth by Callan Wink, Ordinary Mysticism by Mirabai Starr, Daisy Jones and the Six by Taylor Jenkins Reed, All the Colors of the Dark by Chris Whitaker, The Year of Less by Cait Flanders

~ Hot off the needles – Metamorphic Sweater by Andrea Mowry

Thank you for reading, and I hope the new year treats you gently.