Marilyn Nugent’s tale is braided with a cool energy, wittiness and no regrets. Despite crises that would have paralyzed most, her stability, progress and attitude are unshakeable.

Nugent has had a handful of careers, but it wasn’t until she almost died from amoebic dysentery while traveling around the world that her most recent line of work, glass artistry, came to fruition.

Born in Washington, D.C., the 69-year-old Lewes resident was continent-hopping for more than a year in her 40’s.

Nugent, a French language teacher at the time, was escorting a class of students to Europe, and after bidding them goodbye in France, she darted around Egypt, Israel, Kenya and Nepal – staying for a month in a Sri Lankan monastery. By the time she got to the airport in Sumatra, ready to return home, she was unable to move and landed in intensive care for 10 days.

“The joke was I wanted an American doctor. Coming back to the United States, there are no American-born doctors anymore,” said Nugent, exploding in laughter.

She eventually made it to the West Coast, where she took a stained-glass class in Portland, Oregon, slowly snaking her way back East.

Today, the Jefferson Street resident has a studio in her home, a sanctuary with a wildly immense garden and gurgling pond in the back. She describes her elegant oasis as a worker’s shack, again, laughing.

For 20 years, she’s been making jewelry, blowing glass and working with infused glass too. After apprenticing with a glass specialist in Oregon, she landed an artistic residency at Glen Echo National Park in Maryland. In Lewes, she’s also associated with the Peninsula Gallery.

Her handiwork – largely women’s necklaces and bracelets – is made with precision and time. She crafts her own glass beads with a torch and a mandrel, a metal bar used to shape the molten glass over a torch. “I’m sort of the grand mere at the glass program at Glen Echo,” said Nugent, laughing with a sweeping dramatic gesture with her arm. “One day I woke up and realized I’ve been unemployed longer than I’ve been employed.

“It was a super happy day of my life. Whatever I want to do today, I can do. What’s wrong with that? That is what makes you rich,” she said. “I’ve never been happier not working,” she said.

Standing at 5 feet and 3 inches, Nugent wears her silver hair in a choppy shag. She describes her fashion style as: “Mine. I wear whatever I feel like.” Her slim figure and glinting brown eyes roam around the room as she talks. “Please call me small, not short. I don’t want to be short and fat. God forbid. People have gotten so fat in America, they think I’m thin,” she said.

Nugent regularly shops at Deanna’s on Second Street and every morning she walks her dog, Fifi, a 4-year-old Standard Poodle, rising with the sun. “Fifi’s well known on the beach,” she says.

In the mid-1990’s, she moved to the Cape Region full time, bringing her aging mother into her home. “Please, she’s took care of me her entire life, this was nothing,” she said.

She is the closest, however, to her son she gave up for adoption in the early 1960s. At 21, Nugent said she went to France, where she studied at the Sorbonne, to recuperate from her pregnancy. Forty years later she was reunited with him. After her son contacted the Montgomery County Department of Health and Human Services, Nugent received a phone call.

“It was the greatest thing. I said, ‘Oh my God, don’t tell me my son’s trying to contact me?’” Two weeks later, they met again. “It was love at first sight,” she says. “My boy.”

She said she loves her garden, her friends and her freedom. “I like whatever small town-ness is left, although it’s very hard to get to an airport – stupidly unbelievable,” she said.

With force, she says, “I don’t like the Lingo-Townsend proposed shopping center – at all! Oh, go away.” Nugent says very little makes her angry except being ordered around. What does makes her happy?

“Gawd,” she says, drawing the word out. “A lot of stuff from the bird that wakes me up in the morning to truly knowing I’m in charge of how I spend every minute of my life,” she says. “I’m not complicated. If you’re cool let’s hang out,” she says.