Elizabeth Abbott, friend

Two weeks before she lapsed into the final stretch of her life, Pegi and I went walking and she asked me what I loved most about our neighbourhood.  “The trees,” I answered at once, and her face lit up as I described my sense of overwhelming joy each time I, a tiny creature, set out under their overhanging majesty.  “Me, too!” she exclaimed, and found the words for an impromptu canticle extolling the power and determination of the tree mothers to live and nurture their saplings, and to stand guard against whatever evil might approach them.  

Later, chatting over cups of black tea and at her prompting, Pegi and I traded confidences about what we most dreaded about death – or leaving life behind, as we conceived of it – and then we roared with laughter, Pegi’s still deep and hearty, at the absurdity of her worrying most that the family cat Pinto would eat all her littermate food, starving Satch while she, Pinto, fueled her own obesity. 

I haven’t yet fully grasped that Pegi has really left us.  We met in January 1995, in a creative writing class that led to the close friendship that merged our lives right until the end, when that loveliest and kindest of humans was snatched away, forever.

Meeting Pegi Dover (ca. 1995)

Bitter cold that year,

As stormy winds

Whipped luscious white snow.

Our classroom was warm

With hot hope and steamy ambition,

Dreams of secrets revealed,

Searing narratives

Sizzling imagery

Profound meaning.

Success, our words on paper writ large

Wept over, laughed with, a feisty verbiage that

Would be tallied by Amazon.

We formed informal seating arrangements

Based on talent and literary promise.

Nor for me any sci-fi or attempts at fantasy

But if a Shakespeare stank and farted I’d have

Welcomed his company with eyes ashine, nose averted.

The slender woman with a white sweep of hair

Wrote affectingly about her adopted father’s life

And her struggle to conceive a child.

She was really good and not just because her stories were

So compelling.

She could write, this Pegi Dover, she could

Tell it like it was and should be, and it felt like I was there too.

I sat beside her and listened to her reading and remembered her name.

As she did mine.

And that winter of 1995, in that classroom,

Pegi Dover and I became dear friends.