Local woman, Margaret McDillon, has been moved out of the house on Elm Street that she called home for 57 years and into a condo on Main Street.
“Oh, there are so many new things I’ll have to get used to,” said Maggie, a name she came to feel comfortable being called but now must get used to being called Margaret again. “I don’t really think I’m going to fit in here at all,” she said as she looked around at the few moving boxes that held a fraction of the life she loved on Elm Street.
“No one knows me as Maggie here,” she said. “I am just too old and too tired to explain to the numbskulls that Maggie is just another name for Margaret. They ask me, ‘why not Marge,’ and I tell them ‘Margaret will do just fine,’ wondering sometimes if I should bring up the name Peggy to throw them off even further.”
“Then there’s the washer and dryer. ‘I need a step ladder to get to the dryer,’ I told them, ‘I’m gonna break a hip,’ but do they listen? Nope, not on Main Street they don’t,” she sighed wistfully.
“Nobody knows me on Main Street, and with all the hoodlums down there in the street, it’s not like I’m gonna go out there and risk my life making any new friends, at least not like the ones I had on Elm Street. All of ‘em are gone though. I’m the only one that survived…lucky me,” she threw in as a jab at anyone who might get the joke.
The condo is on the second floor of an assisted living facility. Margaret’s family thought it better that she live there now since she almost burned down her house on Elm Street when she up and decided to make tacos one evening, and had one too many margaritas. Actually, these days, with the meds she is taking, one IS too many margaritas.
“They just call it ‘the incident,’” said Maggie. “And then they whisper, so I don’t hear,” she said. “Here’s a news flash, kids. You could be screaming full on in my face by now, and I probably won’t hear you,” she chuckled.
When her adult son found her, she was sitting at the kitchen table wearing a sombrero and telling him it was Siesta time, when in fact, she kind of knew in the back of her mind she meant to say Fiesta.
At any rate, she’s now living on Main Street. Used to be that Main Street was where all the action was; where she and the husband, long since passed, would go to have a good night out on the town.
Unfortunately, in Maggie’s case, hoping to get back some of those memories landed her in a small one-bedroom condo, not particularly to her liking and about as far away as she could get from her comfort zone.