PROVINCETOWN — Marsha Sirota and her wife, Carol MacDonald, arrive at the Carrie A. Seaman Animal Shelter (CASAS) in Provincetown around 8 a.m. every Sunday. They spend about an hour doing chores, caring for the 10 cats up for adoption, and avoiding the claws of a 13-year-old cat named Ollie, who, as a kitten, was found nearly frozen under a boat. Ollie has never quite warmed up.
The couple, who share their East End home with five cats and one old rescue dog, also come to CASAS on Friday mornings and whenever else they are needed. They see volunteer work as a way to serve the community, make friends, and stay busy.
“Volunteering is just another step in what you should be doing in life,” says Sirota, who is 71.
“I unofficially help Carol with the animal welfare of Provincetown,” she adds, work that includes spending a day each week refilling the town’s free pet-waste bag dispensers.
Officially, as she puts it, Sirota delivers Meals on Wheels and drives clients to and from doctors’ appointments for Helping Our Women (HOW). On the fourth Wednesday of every month, she staffs the food pantry at the United Methodist Church on Shank Painter Road.
Sirota drops by the Provincetown Council on Aging almost every day. She is the treasurer of the Friends of the COA and coordinates activities like chair yoga, knitting, crocheting, and movie showings for seniors.
The Council on Aging named Sirota its Senior of the Year last month. MacDonald, who is 86, received that same honor in 2019.
“Everybody should have a Marsha, because she gives of herself unconditionally,” says MacDonald. “No matter what they ask her to do at the COA or HOW, she is always there with a smile on her face.”
Sirota will have a place of honor in Provincetown’s Fourth of July Parade this year, which will start at 11 a.m. at the Harbor Hotel and proceed down Commercial Street. She bought beads to pass out and a baseball-style jersey printed with “S.O.T.Y. 2024” that she designed for herself and ordered online.
The Council on Aging will host a luncheon for Sirota in the fall to which all former winners are invited. When COA Director Chris Hottle told Sirota of her award, she responded in the frank but understated manner that seems to be her signature.
“I think I said, ‘Oh shit,’ ” Sirota says, feeling both honored and surprised.
Sirota first visited Provincetown in the summer of 1976 with MacDonald and their Yonkers-based gay women’s softball team. The couple loved it and made a return trip that December.
“We drove out to Herring Cove and there were whales breaching,” says Sirota. “We decided that this was it.”
They ate at the now-closed Howard Johnson’s and met a waitress who shared a hot tip on an affordable condo. They bought a unit in the Bay Colony complex near the Harbor Hotel for $35,000 in 1980. Sirota moved to Provincetown permanently in 1982, and MacDonald followed shortly after.
For the next two and a half years, Sirota drove to work at a post office in Buzzards Bay six days a week.
“I never missed a day,” she says.
She finally got a transfer to the Provincetown Post Office, where she worked until her retirement in 2013.
MacDonald had already retired from her career with the Postal Service and had spent subsequent years caring for her aging mother, Mel Kirchoff, and volunteering in town. “You can’t sit around the house and do nothing,” Sirota recalls her wife telling her, so she didn’t.
Sirota says she only wishes she had begun volunteering sooner, because the needs here are so profound.
“You wait three months for a referral to get a doctor, but then how do you get there? You call HOW, you call the COA,” says Sirota. Whether it’s food, health care, or the simple need for human contact, “there should be more people to do that volunteer work.”
