Margaret "Margot" Torrey remembers hosting fancy dinner parties at Loomis-Chaffee, a private boarding school in Windsor, Conn., where her husband, Fred Torrey, was headmaster. She would be sitting on one end of the dinner table, across from Fred. The eyes of all the guests, she says, would be turned toward him.

"I might as well have been invisible," she says. "He was the one with the power, the one they needed to influence. But I wanted to say, 'I can make conversation, too.'"

Those who know Margot Torrey today do not describe her as invisible. Nor do they doubt the 74-year-old artist and writer can make conversation. To the contrary, her friends describe her as strong and wise and powerful and adventurous.

"Margot is a woman who knows herself and is able to extend the wisdom of this knowing to other women," says close friend Rupa Cousins, who lives in Dummerston. "She honors herself as a powerful woman, particularly in her writing and, in doing that, honors all women. And, as she gets more mature, she gets more bold."

Torrey is a woman whose motto is "Carpe Diem" (seize the day). She is an artist who does intricate woodcuts with such titles as "Rainbow Serpent," "Pelicans and Pines," "At the Lake" and "Night Owl"; ceramic sculptures; and colorful banners made from woodcuts in which nature and rural imagery commingle with messages of peace and celebration. She ran the Putney Woodshed for many years in the big red barn that stands behind her house in Putney. It was instrumental in showcasing the works of Vermont artists and craftspeople. For several years, she was heavily involved in the open studio tour in Putney -- two days each year when artists open their studios for the public to view them making their art. She continues to be active in the art scene around Putney and Brattleboro, most recently with the month-long women's film festival. And she is a writer, gardener, world traveler and loving mother of four and grandmother of 10. Her friends say they take lessons on getting old from Torrey.

Torrey didn't always feel so free to be herself, however. She grew up in West Hartford, Conn., in a well-to-do family that had strong ties to New Hampshire. Her mother's family owned a summerhouse at Lake Sunapee, where the family spent every July. Torrey and her four children still spend a lot of time at the home as do the families of Torrey's two brothers.

"I grew up a country girl," says Torrey. "West Hartford was still country then, not suburbia. We had lots of land and a mill pond and a rowboat."

Both of Torrey's parents loved the outdoors and Torrey has continued to hike, camp and swim throughout her life. She especially loves the water and her home is filled with water-related images – mermaids, turtles, dolphins, seashells.

Torrey went to Smith College, as did her mother and grandmother. In her junior year, she experienced a year abroad that began her lifelong love of France. She and the other Smith students lived in Paris and took all their classes in French. Torrey, who was majoring in art history and French, also took art courses.

"It was an exciting and wonderful year," she says. "It was fabulous to go to the museums and the medieval cathedrals. The Luxembourg Gardens were nearby and we spent time there or in cafes. We felt very French."

Since then, Torrey has returned to France several times, often with family. And she continues to meet monthly with a group of area people for potluck dinners at which only French is spoken.

After graduating from Smith, Torrey went to work at the New York Public Library. But, before she left, she spent the summer in Jaffrey, New Hampshire. That was where she met the man who was to be her husband. Both were working as camp counselors at a camp organized by the Green/Torrey family. Fred was a nephew of the camp organizers.

Frederick Green Torrey's family goes back seven generations in Jaffrey. The family still owns the Ainsworth manse in Jaffrey Center. Laban Ainsworth was the first minister in Jaffrey. The Torrey family spent Christmases in Jaffrey and Margot Torrey and her children still attend the annual family meeting there every summer.

After that summer in Jaffrey, Fred went to the Marines and Margot went to New York. They married the following May and Margot joined him at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina. After a year there, they headed to Mt. Herman School in Northfield, Mass. Fred was hired to teach math and Margot to work in the library and teach art. Their four children – Katharine, David, William and Jane (now Neige) – were born there while Fred gradually moved up within the administration to assistant headmaster.

"Those were wonderful years," says Torrey. "We were very involved in everything going on at the school. It was a rural, isolated area so we did a lot to try to bring new experiences to the students."

Torrey still remembers a series of lectures that had a particular impact on her. A Williams professor, she said, gave lectures on history "as though there were women" and "as though there were blacks."

It was the early ‘60s and the beginning of the Civil Rights Movements. Torrey was concerned that her children did not know any black people. So she arranged through a minister of a church in Roxbury, Mass., to have a brother and sister come and spend a couple of weeks with the Torreys in Northfield. Tony, 6, and Sheila, 12, were about the same ages as two of Torrey's children. As it turned out, Sheila didn't like the country but Tony did and returned to visit the family often.

"He became a great addition to our family," says Torrey. Later, Fred Torrey arranged for Tony to attend a private elementary school in the suburbs of Boston and to attend Loomis-Chaffee for his high school years.

Though the Torreys lost touch with Tony for awhile, he "suddenly resurfaced one day," says Torrey, to tell them he was getting married and they had to come. They have stayed in touch and Torrey has visited Tony and his wife in Costa Rica, where they run a restaurant.

After 15 years at Mt. Herman, the Torreys moved to Connecticut when Fred was offered the headmaster position at Loomis-Chaffee. And so began Margot's nine-year stint as a headmaster's wife. She also was active on the academic side where she directed the senior humanities program, brought in visiting speakers and started a term-abroad program to – where else? – France.

The guests at Torrey's dinner parties at Loomis-Chaffee probably had no idea she felt anything but positive about her role as a headmaster's wife. She was the "perfect" hostess and supportive wife and loving mother. Yet, this was a time – the late ‘60s and early ‘70s -- of great turmoil in this country. People protested the Vietnam War, Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy were assassinated, students were killed at Kent State and racial riots were erupting in big cities like Detroit and Washington, D.C. and Los Angeles.

Many were questioning expectations and authority, and Torrey was one of them. In 1972-73, along with a colleague, she conducted research on the role of the headmaster's wife and published it with the title "The Changing View from Behind the Teacup or The Strange Case of the Headmaster's Wife."

She found that the wife was viewed as "not primarily a person in her own right" but only in association with her husband. "She was a public figure not by dint of personal achievement but by reflection from her husband's job." She was expected to be "always cheerfully, attractively supportive, never controversial, a sounding board and helpmate for all, especially for her harried husband, whose first priority was the school." She was expected "not only to do certain things (and not to do others), but also to be, to embody, a whole conglomerate of saintly attributes" such as friendly, gracious, understanding, sympathetic and discreet.

Torrey felt she herself was living this role. She had a "derived identity," she says, an identity based on who she was in relation to a man rather than on her own individual talents and opinions and accomplishments. This was also the time of the women's movement.

"I don't know which came first," she says, "my dissatisfaction or the women's movement. But I was the perfect example. I wasn't a person in my own right. I had been brought up to defer to the opinions of males."

The study of the role of the headmaster's wife and its publication were "quite revolutionary" for the time, says Torrey. "We were doing what we weren't supposed to do. We were rocking the boat."

Katharine Torrey, Margot's daughter, was a teen-ager during most of those years and saw her mother's dissatisfaction.

"It was a tough time to be a leader of young people," she says, "and my father was occupied with his job. Mummy had to live a much more constrained life than was comfortable for her. I still see her as having a foot in both worlds. She was raised in a traditional way for women. She could certainly do the job of being the elegant hostess; she could be the headmaster's wife. But she also wanted to find her real self and she's still working on that."

Katharine Torrey now lives in East Alstead, where she founded and directs the Orchard School.

After nine tumultuous years at Loomis-Chaffee, Margot and Fred decided to move "back to Mt. Herman territory" and settled in Putney. All the kids were grown and "we moved to where we wanted to live," says Torrey. It was the late ‘70s, the years of the energy crisis in this country. They started a business setting Danish cast iron stoves in the red barn behind their home. Later, Fred took a job as headmaster of a school in Thetford, Vt., but they stayed in Putney and he came home on weekends.

Margot experienced a burst of creative energy. She "finally had time to do art," she says, and resumed woodcutting, an art she had begun many years before when she was a Mt. Herman. She had time for her flower and vegetable gardens and began learning about the many other craftspeople in the Putney area. She helped organize the Putney Art Festival and got heavily involved in the open studio tours.

"I was satisfying this part of myself that had been repressed," she says.

As Torrey got more involved in the arts, she began selling arts and crafts in the Putney Woodshed, her own and that of many artists in the area. Gradually, the store put more emphasis on crafts than on the wood stoves.

"I could just feel the energy of all those creative hands in the shop," she says. "It was a nice life. I could sit at the picnic table working on my woodcuts waiting for customers."

"Margot is always encouraging creativity," says friend Marcia Bourne of Brattleboro, "in others as well as herself. She is hugely supportive of other artists and craftspeople and an enthusiastic promoter and appreciator of the arts."

In 1990, Fred took early retirement and the couple began making plans to travel, something they both loved. Their first trip was to Key Largo, Florida, where Margot swam with dolphins. One dolphin, in particular, kept coming up to her and nudging her, she remembers.

Later that same day, Fred said he wasn't feeling well; he thought he might be having the symptoms of a stroke. They decided to go to a doctor and were immediately sent to the emergency room at a hospital where Fred collapsed as he was signing in at the desk. In the hospital, he began having seizures.

At 4 o'clock, says Torrey, they discovered he had a huge tumor on his brain and, by 11 o'clock, he was dead. It was a tremendous shock. There had been no symptoms before that day, no warnings. He was an energetic, vigorous, apparently healthy man.

"I was just in shock for a long time," Torrey says. "In the next few months, I had so much trouble sleeping. But I would call up that dolphin and the vision of swimming next to it and I would be comforted."

Torrey continued to run the store and says "it was good to have something like that to do" at that time. But she wanted more time with her family and she still wanted to travel, though it would be without Fred as they had planned. She closed the shop and, in the years since, has traveled to Fiji, Samoa, Bali, Turkey, Australia, Greece, New Zealand and more. After she sold the store, she used the money to take her whole family – all four kids and their spouses and 10 grandchildren – to the Virgin Islands. In 1995, she went to the international women's conference in China. And this year, she will return to her beloved France and take a trip to Finland, both in June.

Bourne describes Torrey as "a world citizen."

"She digs deeply into the cultures of the world," she says. "She is passionate about the mythologies and crafts and cultures of different parts of the world. And she is such an appreciator of the role of women in these cultures. She is an ardent feminist as well as an ardent world citizen."

About four years ago, Torrey joined a local writers' group and began writing about her life and travels.

"When I was growing up, my mother never talked about herself," says Torrey. "It was the women's role to be self-effacing and to draw others out. I still have many questions I'd like answers to."

Jan Frazier of Northfield facilitates the writing group. "Margot has really come into her voice as a writer," she says. "There's a real gracefulness about Margot's language. She puts sentences together in a beautiful, almost old-fashioned way. It's so full of sensory details. You get both a strong sense of the scene and of the narrator."

Frazier also admires Torrey's independence and adventurousness. "At age 74, she just keeps growing," says Frazier. "She doesn't let things limit her. She continues to be an adventurer both physically and an adventurer of the spirit. She's not afraid to keep questioning and to take risks. Margot is one of my real heroes. I want to be like here when I grow up."

Over the years, Torrey also has been very involved in Esalen, a spiritual growth center in Big Sur, Calif. She made her first trip there in 1980 and has gone several times since.

"Esalen was incredibly important to my spiritual and human growth," she says. "This was my journey inward, one of my biggest journeys. I worked through a lot of issues and dealt with things that were keeping me from living a life that flowed, that stood in the way of fully living my life."

A major part of Torrey's current path is what she calls her "crone journey." A crone is an old, wise woman.

"I know I have a limited number of years left," says Torrey. "I need to know how to live my later years as fully aware and fully conscious and fully present as possible.

"My crone years are years of authenticity," she adds. "I don't have to cover up anything. This is the person I am. And I've worked very hard on knowing who that person is."

Torrey is part of a national Crone Council that meets annually. "It's a gathering of women of a certain age," she says. "Mostly, it's women telling their stories."

Katharine Torrey says her mother is "looking at her life quite earnestly and trying to determine what to do with what's left. She has so many different interests and talents, it's a challenge to figure out which one is going to use her heart at the moment."

Joan Benneyan, a friend of Torrey's from Brattleboro, has been with her in a women's group and will travel to Finland with her in June.

"Margot is exploring a different way of aging as a woman," she says. "She's a good example of living fully day to day, doing everything you can and not letting stuff get in the way. If this is what is means to be 'of a certain age,' I'm in good company."

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