CLINTON | On a piece of porcelain in her left hand was a flower outlined in dark black lines. In her right hand was a brush, and underneath it a palette of paints marching clockwise in a circle.
"See, I'm loading my brush now," said Margie Sweazy of downstate Clinton, dipping to where she'd been told the paint was located.
As she looked out through magnifying lenses she wore, Sweazy could explain what she was doing. But even with the magnification, even with the dark outlined image, she couldn't see what had almost become second nature after 40 years.
"I can't see the outline," she said. "I'm lost.
"I know I need to bring this together, but I'm lost."
Calmly tapping the porcelain, her friend and former teacher Junette Seiler told Sweazy, "Come up here where my finger is. Now down toward your right hand."
Sweazy, a porcelain painter and artist, began to lose her sight about a dozen years ago. Glaucoma, surgeries, a hemorrhage in one eye and a deteriorating optic nerve have contributed.
"In the last six months, I've lost even more," Sweazy said. "I see light and dark. I'm thankful for that. I try to make the best of it."
Seiler is among a group of artist friends who have been spending "Mondays with Margie" for about 25 years.
But as Sweazy's eyesight left her, her friends did not. They figured out a way to keep her going right along with them until just recently.
Sweazy, who took her first porcelain painting lessons in the late 1960s or early 1970s, moved to Clinton as a young bride after graduating from high school in California, though she'd met her husband of 61 years when visiting the city prior to moving there.
"I graduated in June. He returned from World War II, and we were married in December," she said. "He was afraid he would lose me."
During the war, Sweazy said she tapped and toe danced (ballet), entertaining with the USO aboard ships and in troop camps.
Now, with the help of a housekeeper and meal delivery, Sweazy cares for her husband, diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease.
And she is pleased Mondays with Margie will continue.
"I'm not brave," Sweazy said. "I'm just trying to survive, and I want to be happy."
