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Margaret S. Marangione is a Professor of writing at the University of Virginia and Blue Ridge Community College. Her novel, Across the Blue Ridge Mountains, has been submitted for the Pen Faulkner award. Additionally, her short stories, essays and poetry have been published in Appalachian Journal, The Upper New Review, Lumina Journal, Enchanted Living and Sagewoman magazine.

Latest Posts By Maggie Marangione

10 months ago

How Much Therapy Do I Really Need?

I reached my 60th birthday having lost quite a bit of emotional and psychological baggage yet finding myself still struggling with some nagging neurosis. Do they prevent me from working? No. Do they occupy more than I want…

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11 months ago

Fragile Is Only a Feeling

Driving over 14 hours with my estranged ex-husband, I remembered I know how to thrive. Leading up to this trip I was in a funk, or my meds had stopped working, but it was definingly a low-grade depression. Empty nest syndrome…

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12 months ago

My Mother, Myself: Grace Can Be Found

My neighbor, Heidi, recently told me, “I’ve forgiven my mother, but I won’t go to her funeral.” My friend Lynne has not communicated with her mother in 30 years. She occasionally trolls for a death certificate because, as the only child, there might be something…

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1 year ago

I Am Here – A Horse, A Date and Finding My Center

Recently, I fell off the wagon – the dating wagon – when I went on the most centered dates of divine oneness. That is saying a lot. I can only describe it in relation to a dream I had just a week or so before our meeting…

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1 year ago

My Radiation Face and Thoughts on Beauty Advice

As I age, I note that beauty advice is more of a conversation among friends, family, and even strangers. Sometimes this input is unsolicited; sometimes it’s just like when Madonna appeared on the 2023 Grammys, looking like she had swollen a tick…

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1 year ago

What Do My Sons, Forgiveness and a Goat Have in Common?

I was the only person in line at Barnes and Noble on a rainy Friday. The girl at the register was cradling the phone with her neck, as she busily worked the computer. With her free hand she was gesturing in the air towards the back of the store…

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1 year ago

That’s Me in the Corner, Losing My Religion

When it comes to spirituality, I’m all over the map. Early childhood in Catholicism, late teenager goddess religion, Irish mysticism and earth-based spiritualty, Buddhism, meditation circles, Emersonian transcendentalism as well as attending mosques…

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1 year ago

Can We Find Wide Open Love?

My mother’s words of romance advice were, “Make sure they love you more than you love them.” I only understood this as an older woman. As a young woman, her words fell on deaf ears. What would be the point of any love at all if you did…

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1 year ago

To Date or Not to Date, Is That Really the Question?

I have been divorced for 15 years and in that time period I have had three two-year relationships and many dates. Relationship #1 ended in his unexpected death. #2 ended because he bored me into a coma, #3 was with a musician 13 years younger…

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1 year ago

Embracing a Different Kind of Bad-Ass Aging

I got old too soon. I know what you are thinking, don’t we all. But I really did, or at least I felt like I did. Menopause at 46, debilitating arthritis that is causing my joints to be replaced, and let’s not even begin to talk about what happened to my middle…

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