centenarian bluestockings

Happy birthday to a truly great bluestocking:

"ROME – Rita Levi Montalcini, a Nobel Prize-winning scientist, said Saturday that even though she is about to turn 100, her mind is sharper than it was she when she was 20.

Levi Montalcini, who also serves as a senator for life in Italy, celebrates her 100th birthday on Wednesday, and she spoke at a ceremony held in her honor by the European Brain Research Institute.

She shared the 1986 Nobel Prize for Medicine with American Stanley Cohen for discovering mechanisms that regulate the growth of cells and organs.

"At 100, I have a mind that is superior — thanks to experience — than when I was 20," she told the party, complete with a large cake for her.

The Turin-born Levi Montalcini recounted how the anti-Jewish laws of the 1930s under Benito Mussolini's Fascist regime forced her to quit university and do research in an improvised laboratory in her bedroom at home.

"Above all, don't fear difficult moments," she said. "The best comes from them."

"I should thank Mussolini for having declared me to be of an inferior race. This led me to the joy of working, not any more unfortunately, in university institutes but in a bedroom," the scientist said."

Meanwhile, Margaret Caldwell, who is 102, has expressed interest in Wicca - there must be something about the wisdom of experience that makes one willing to explore new avenues...

An old crone, my dears, is a wise, old woman, one of the four aspects of Mother Earth, young and innocent in the Springs, full of seed and motherly in the Summer, ripe and bursting with produce in the Fall and wise and knowing in the fullness of Winter.