The Six and Twenty Club met on April 23 via Zoom.
During quotations and current events which centered on the unusual snowfall of the past week, President Beverly Drapalik conducted a short business meeting, and then introduced Marsha Wagstaff as the program leader.
Wagstaff, dressed in a sloth costume surrounded her “sloths” and other sloth gear including several books, jokingly asked if anyone might guess her program theme.
She first gave a short review of her club book titled, “Find the Good” by Heather Lende, an obituary writer in Haines, Alaska, where she resides with her five children and husband, Chip, who owns the local hardware store. She puts much soul into her writings especially descriptions of the lives of those she honors in her obituaries.
Wagstaff easily transitioned to her program by described her love for the easy-going, slow-moving, ever happy sloth and her attempts to observe and study them. She talked of her behind-the-scenes adventure at the Boonscroft Museum in Dayton with her daughter and granddaughter as they touched and fed Patience, the museum’s sloth resident.
She told the ladies of her “bucket list cruise” taken in February/March 2020, visiting among other places, the home of the most famous Sloth Sanctuary in Limon, Costa Rica. Wagstaff described characteristics of sloths who only eat leaves and plants and sleep in trees upside for 70% of the day.
During the visit to the sanctuary, they visited the nursery with injured baby sloths and the adult section housing among others — a sloth who had lost a limb, one who was blind, and one who had a severe overbite making eating a challenge.
Sanctuaries and museums are funded by donations and the “adopting” of sloths by patrons. Tours also help run the operations.
As part of the sanctuary visit, she enjoyed a canoe trip into the jungle where we saw beautiful vegetation, a sloth sleeping in a tree, an alligator and several very cantankerous monkeys.
Wagstaff closed her program asking everyone to be more sloth-like and “adopt the pace of nature; her secret is patience.”
