On Thursday the 18th of January in the year 1940 Joe and Doris MacNeil welcomed into the world a 8 lb 10 oz baby girl named Margaret Leone into the world. Actually Joe wasn’t pacing the hospital corridors, nervously waiting to meet his sweet little girl. Like most young men of his generation Joe was gone to Europe to fight a terrible war.
She came into this world full of promise and potential. I have a 5 year diary that she kept as a teenager and it is full of sweetness and sharp sense of humour. It is the writing of a girl with a long a full life ahead of her. She worried about school and making her parents happy. She cried when James Dean died. She liked ice cream and boys with an edge, a flaw she carried her entire life and passed along to her only daughter. 😉 She talked about playing spin the bottle and hitching into town. She kept letters he little sister wrote he while she was away at summer camp.
She had a tumultuous relationship with her Father, who was a stranger to when he came home after the war. She adored her godfather and uncle John McPhee. She had hopes and dreams as wide as oceans and as high as mountains. No where in her words is there a glimmer of fear that her life would be cut so short. In her last entry she is twenty years old, fresh out of nursing school; she never thought about her own body betraying her. Cancer wasn’t even a whisper at the back of her mind, it had not yet claimed her own parents. It hadn’t started to grow and change inside her. She was still just a kid starting out in the world. She had no way of knowing that her adventures would have to take a back seat to surgeries and treatments. She could not predict that she only had twenty four years left to cram it all in.
So on October the 6th 2013 I am running for the little girl with the green eyes and freckles who got the mumps when she was 15 and was happy because it meant she didn’t have to write exams. If you would like to help with my fundraising effort you can click HERE.
Flying Fat Girl! 
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