Doreen/Maggie: The End

Poof! As I write this, authorities around Tucson, AZ, are turning the place upside down looking for Nancy Guthrie. By the time you read this, the mystery may have been solved with the news media chasing the next story. Or maybe not.

We recently finished the account of Doreen, who morphed into “Maggie” in the late 1940’s and dropped from sight.

She slipped away from her two bedroom home with cracks in the floor wide enough to see chickens below. The old rock well casing is the only reminder of the house.

Her departure was her choice. She got into a shiny car driven by an engineer she met at the Bell Bomber plant. Doreen was not seen nor heard from again.

The gifts Doreen brought to the relationship were youth and beauty.

She should have known that bad starts rarely produce good endings.

As a young widow, Maggie tried to make a life in her husband’s home town near Buffalo, NY, with her husband’s family that meant nothing to her nor her to them.

She was never ushered into the bosom of her in-law family, and they were critical of her southern ways.

Her husband’s family were not churchgoing people, but she had probably missed few Sundays at the Stilesboro Methodist Church.

The older she got, the more she felt the pull of her family. She likely felt she had committed an unforgivable transgression and was beyond forgiveness. She was a stranger in her own life.

She eventually pulled up and moved to Cartersville, GA, the nearest large town near Stilesboro.

She got busy being busy, tried to blend in, volunteered for this and that and tried to explain the accent she acquired in New York.

After a go-between phone call, she eventually met her sister, Marie. It didn’t go well and they were never able to bridge the decades separating them.

Her only living relatives were nephews, nieces and cousins. Some were pleased to get closure to her disappearance as a young woman, but some took the hard line over the way she took her leave.

She could have left a note, instead she left pain.

Doreen/Maggie grew old trying to fit in somewhere. Anywhere.

She didn’t fit there and really didn’t fit here either.

Stilesboro is having a new life as a bedroom community. There have been three generations in the community since Doreen left. Nobody remembers.

As Maggie, she tried to find a place and failed.

The only reminder of her is a stone in a small cemetery.

joenphillips@yahoo.com