The Marshmallow Roast

Until the day I climbed the narrow stairs to Margaret Cosgrove’s canvas-crammed apartment, I had known her chiefly as “the cat lady.” She was, I knew, ready day or night to climb a scaffold or go out on a limb—literally—to rescue some “poor little kitty.”

Birds, too. Once I was chatting with her on the sidewalk when a passing car hit a rock dove. Before I could blink twice, Margaret had gathered the pigeon in her arms and was taking it home. There she kept an arsenal of healing remedies. And she knew how to set a broken wing.

Over the 37 years that Margaret and I had lived on the same block, we had become street-corner friends. I enjoyed her playfulness and wit, her fierce defense of the underdog. I shared her commitment to the natural world—and her outrage at its ongoing destruction.

Margaret was born in 1927 near Sylvania, Ohio, a tiny town that was once a stop on the Underground Railroad. Sylvania—its forests, its flowering meadows, its noble ideals—strongly influenced my spirited friend. Her father was a forester and engineer, her mother an educator. By the time she was ten years old, Margaret knew the constellations and the birds and every tree in the woods near Sylvania by its English and its Latin name.

It was as a child that she contracted what she calls “this disease to have to be always drawing.” She filled countless hours sketching flowers and trees.

When the time came “to learn more about the world,” Margaret joined the Cadet Nursing Corps. This was a small branch of the armed services, formed by President Roosevelt to resolve the critical shortage of trained nurses at the end of World War II. There she “learned to handle birth and death and just about everything in between.”

Later she worked as an art therapist in the psychiatric ward of Women’s Hospital in New York, taught art in a girls’ school, and wrote and illustrated a series of exquisite science books for middle-school children. She also taught herself Spanish so she could banter with the Mexican workers in our neighborhood.

Nowadays Margaret Cosgrove is a sprightly lass of 83, so when I returned to the city from my summer vacation several years ago I was shocked to see her coming toward me on a cane. She was, she confessed, fighting Stage III endometrial cancer. She had insisted on receiving huge doses of chemotherapy—“I have work to do,” she told her doctors—and these had left her feeling “wobbly.”

That “work” was, I assumed, connected with her rescue of cats and birds. But I had not yet discovered the greater commitments and the wider world of Margaret Cosgrove.