Mary Kenner herself, in interviews conducted in her later years, spoke about her inventions and her experience with a directness and lack of bitterness that was striking.

She seems to have maintained her sense of herself as an inventor — as someone whose ideas were good, whose designs were sound, and whose contributions were real — even through the decades of rejection and obscurity.

The resilience required to maintain that self-assessment across eighteen years of waiting for a manufacturing partner, and across decades of working a flower shop while the patents sat in the drawer, is itself a remarkable form of achievement.

The Walker Attachment and Empathetic Design