Our World (Paperback)

T HOUGH YOU HAVE KNOWN SOMEONE for more than forty years, though you have worked with them and lived with them, you do not know everything. I do not know everything but a few things, which I will tell. M. had will and wit and probably too much empathy for others; she was quick in speech and she did not suffer fools. When you knew her she was unconditionally kind. But also, as our friend the Bishop Tom Shaw said at her memorial service, you had to be brave to get to know her. Trust was not greatly at her service, but loyalty was. She kept everything in the darkness of an uncountable number of boxes, in file cabinets. I have said many a prayer to patience these past months, searching out the negatives-some of them a half century old-of the many photographs that she developed and printed and, by the late sixties, put away. In some cases the work was wonderfully organized, but often it was not. In some cases the photographs or negatives were precisely dated, at other times I have had to make a judgment, knowing, from her journals, pretty much where she was in the years before we met. All of the photographs in this volume are black and white. There are many color negatives and prints also in the boxes, but that, perhaps, is for another time.