“I missed it last year for only the third time since about 1968,” she said, “but I’ll do it next year.”

Fish said she is among the first women to ever complete a marathon, and she has completed Boston more times than any other woman having started back when women were officially banned from entering.

In 1967, Kathrine Switzer became the first official female entrant to complete the historic 26.-mile course having received her bib number by applying as “K.V. Switzer.” A famous photo of her effort involves her husband running alongside her and delivering a body block to a race official who had run onto the course to try to pull her off.

Fish, however, said she never experienced any such incident during her years of running it before women were allowed to enter in 1972 because she always ran with her husband, the late Rev. Dr. Howard M. “Mac” Fish, who taught divinity studies at Harvard at the time, “and they didn’t want to mess with the clergy,” she said.

Margo speaks with a distinctively gentle, sultry voice and often addresses others as “Dahling” reminiscent of Tallulah Bankhead.

Born in Erie, Pennsylvania in 1929, Margo met her future husband in kindergarten who proposed to her in 1945 near the dam on the south end of Lake Placid lake with the understanding that they would finish college before marrying, which they did six years later. When they bought Tapawingo, which is Mohawk for “house of joy,” it consisted of only one structure.

“Now it has 15, or maybe 14. I can’t remember,” she said.

Despite their inexperience at housing construction and design, she and Mac built it up themselves by hand, drawing on their personal creativity for ideas with a little help from an architect who was a former roommate of Mac’s. The buildings include guest quarters, a kitchen, dining room, chapel, study and social room where poetry readings and concerts often take place during the summer.

There are no hallways, just pathways connecting all the buildings with steppingstones set in cement, the 60-pound bags for which Margo hauled in with a wheelbarrow on her own. She then painstakingly set the names of her family members into the pathways by creating intricate mosaics using pieces of glass she collected from all over the world. Where the terrain may be too steep for pathways they built bridges instead.

Mac and Margo had four children together, and they moved around fairly often because of Mac’s college teaching and ministerial careers. But Tapawingo was the only place they ever owned, so every summer the family retreated back there because it was essentially their home.

According to a 1986 New York Times feature, Mac as a child hunted for lost balls on the golf course behind Red Wing, his family’s original Lake Placid lake retreat dating back to the 1930s. He also sold lemonade to thirsty golfers and watched his children do the same.

“It became kind of a shared childhood,” he told The Times.

With rituals being part of summer life, an annual picnic on Moose Island concluded with everyone gathering a handful of moss and putting a birthday candle in it. Once the candles were lit, the clumps of moss were placed in the water and floated away. Everybody made a wish, and the builder of the moss boat that sunk last was supposed to have his or her wish come true.

“It is the only place in the world where I don’t have to tell people, ‘This is the way it was,’ because it still is that way,” he told The Times.

With Margo being 89 now it seemed appropriate to ask what kind of physical activity she does to stay in shape for the Boston Marathon.

“Opening up Tapawingo in the spring by myself when I come back from Florida,” she said. “It sits four football fields from the car. I have no caretaker, so I carry everything.”

Mac died of a heart attack in the summer of 2001 just a few yards from the spot where he had proposed to Margo 56 years earlier.

During the early years of Margo’s marriage, she was active in theater, but by the time she reached her early 40s she had grown weary of the stress of “waiting in the green room” just before making her entrances onstage, she said, so she decided to enroll in art school. Then as she was about to launch her first exhibition she experienced the same anxiety.

That didn’t stop her from having more shows though.

“The people bought all my paintings,” she said. “I’ve done about 25 one-person shows since then in places like BluSeed Studios (in Saranac Lake), Oxford University, and the Hanover (Fine Arts) Gallery in Edinburgh, Scotland.”

To graduate she had to demonstrate her proficiency in many disciplines, but her concentration evolved toward abstract art. Examples of her work can be found through online search engines by keying in “The Poetry of the Rev. Dr. James A. Forbes,” a 2014 publication that features a different copy of one of her paintings next to each poem.

Conversations with Margo can quickly take on a celestial air with a sense of the ideal and how it relates to the overall big picture. In terms of the message behind her art, she said, “My art is about the interconnection of all living matter whether it be the energy from the sun or the energy that formed the origin of any life. Perfection in any art is impossible, so one hopes to breed the humility of humankind.

“Art can be a universal language like music. I hope it can bring a universal peace without national boundaries.”

Margo earned a master’s degree in divinity from Union Theological Seminary in 1996 and had her thesis for that degree, “Changing the Image of God from Human to Energy,” published last year.

On the back cover it states, “If you hear the echoes of creation, you hear the joy of the sacred. To express a part of the universal mystery in painting, is haunting, complex, and wondrous.

“Art is the sacred language of the soul. It is appropriate for one art form to speak for another. Definitions meager the holy. Art does not define or confine. The undefined ecstasy of life is the ecstasy of art. Art is our sanctuary, the purveyor of unexplainable wonder.”