Martha Stewart carved linoleum and glass and paper. But the way she cut a phrase was artful.

Fitting, then, that her standing room-only memorial service last weekend was a celebration of her words.

The Rev. Tom Goldsmith greeted Stewart every Sunday as she picked her spot in the back pew at Salt Lake City's First Unitarian Church. "How are you?" he would ask.

"I'm 93," she'd say.

From the beginning, Stewart was too quick.

"She was born very bright, very talented and willful -- not qualities appreciated in the Salt Lake City of the turn of the century," says Peter Stewart, her son.

She skipped two grades and graduated from LDS High School at 15. Wrote her first poems at 17. Married her sweetheart, Justin, five years later in 1935, the same year she graduated from the University of Utah. She sketched a self-portrait while caring for a 1-year-old. Took up linoleum-cut Christmas cards and stained glass. She kept her "restless intellect" engaged with the mundane tasks of home and family, Peter says. But it seeped out in a lifetime of poetry and puns.

We search each other's shining eyes

In amorous inspections

And you don't know and I don't know

We're finding small reflections.

Children gravitated her way. She cut paper butterflies and giraffes with saddles.

"Most adults did not get it. Martha did. She slid into our universe," says Stewart Olsen, a nephew.

A tender mother, she sewed her kids' clothing with fabric from Auerbach's and patterns from her head. She knit a tiny cable-knit doll sweater on toothpicks and made rabbit-eared pancakes for sleepovers. She called her gangly, acne-blasted teenage daughter her "long-stemmed American beauty rose." Her children only discovered gentle ribbing years later in binders of her prose.

Think those labor pains hurt?

Wait'll that daughter treats you like dirt.

As her children grew, Martha worked at the Salt Lake City Library, Utah State Library for the Blind and the State Historical Society. Her politics were unapologetically left. Never elected to office, she was nonetheless a legend among Democrats. And, for two decades, she hosted a humanist salon -- served up with waffles, eggs and a guest -- twice a month. Ten people only -- the number who could fit around the dining room table. I finally got my invitation two years ago. I left her house in Salt Lake City's Avenues with an armful of books.

"Quietly, she thought deeply about big things," says Martha's daughter, Polly Stewart.

As time went on, she became weary. Her poems wavered from Shel Silverstein wry to glum. "In her 90s, my mom did not know why she was still living," says Polly. She would occasionally send a "Thanks," now and again, a "To Whom it May Concern" skyward.

Nonegenarian, crabbed and drear

What are you still doing here?

"They just don't make them like that anymore," says Goldsmith. Willowy and graceful with vintage manners and charm -- all of which camouflaged a zinging wit. Each week, she condensed his sermons into couplets. "Boy, she nailed it every time."

Martha died quietly at home last month. For now, the salon will continue in her absence in her dining room.

"It is a rich legacy," says Heather Stewart Dorrell. "Mother was a bright spark, a once-off in the universe."

Rebecca Walsh is a columnist. Reach her at walsh@sltrib.com