Jeffrey,
Do you know that Maggie Osler died in September? Although she didn't come from Calgary to Baltimore for our reunion, she started writing to people around that time, and I responded. As a result,  we corresponded frequently, playing a huge 50-year catch-up game of tag, by answering each other's correspondence as soon as we received it. That made for a year of pretty much everyday letters.
     The correspondence delighted me for a number of reasons. For one, Maggie was a great letter writer. She described events and people in such a way that I formed in my mind a clear idea of her life. I was so pleased to be becoming Maggie's friend. In high school, though we worked together on the newspaper, I didn't see much of her. I remember clearly that she was light-years ahead of me with regard to social conscience. She deeply cared about civil rights and politics, whereas I remember caring mostly about issues much closer at hand, i.e., whether I was invited to this or that party. In the course of our correspondence last year, I was happy to see evidence that we were at last on the same wave length.
      We wrote a lot about food-what we were cooking and eating-so when Maggie told me during the winter that the stomach upset and lack of appetite she had suffered in December during her trip to a conference in the boot of Italy were continuing and she was thrilled to be losing weight, I should have been alerted-but wasn't-that something may have been wrong. In late June, I was shocked and terribly saddened to read her letter saying that she had gone to the hospital one night with a terrible pain in her stomach and emerged with the diagnosis of inoperable pancreatic cancer.
     In the few months she had left, she had some pleasures. Her major project for the 2009-2010 academic year was finishing the proofs of her book Reconfiguring the World: Nature, God, and Human Understanding from the Middle Ages to Early Modern Europe, published by Johns Hopkins Press.  She received copies of the book in the summer. Maggie had a remarkable group of friends in Calgary, who took care of her, so that she was able to stay in her home. Throughout the year of our correspondence, she recounted many activities with these friends, which involved a lot of dinners and hiking as frequently as possible in the Canadian Rockies. No immediate family members survive her, but these friends must have taken on the role of family in her life.
     Maggie had other book projects in mind (one being a memoir about her parents' lives), and I know that, if given the years, she would have continued to lead a generous, compassionate, intellectual, fun, active, food-filled life and would have given much pleasure to her friends and advanced scholarship in her field of the history and philosophy of science.
      I'll always remember the year of our correspondence, which was directly brought on by our happy and nostalgic feelings surrounding our 50th.
        Ann