A Summer Landscape

My childhood friend and classmate Ann Robinson Misir grew up on a central New York farm. We were good friends all through school, sang together in the Episcopal church choir and various school choruses, and were both in Girl Scouts. Ann also worked as a candy striper in the local hospital, all the while working as well on her family farm, and keeping up her very good grades. After graduation she went to college and became a Spanish language teacher, married, raised two children, and became a devoted grandmother. After she retired from teaching, she opened a tea room where she enjoyed welcoming regular customers.

We hadn’t had much contact at all after graduation, but around the time of our high school 50th reunion, when many of us started re-connecting, she got in touch directly and invited me to a brunch with some of our former female classmates at a cottage she had rented on a local lake. As we all caught up during the course of that delicious meal, I learned she had been treated for a serious illness which was then in remission. You would never have known it. She had an extremely positive attitude, saying, “My illness doesn’t need to define me” — and it certainly did not.

We found that we had a lot in common. We had both married husbands from immigrant families and made lives for ourselves beyond the rural world of central New York where we had been born, without forgetting or rejecting those roots. She had studied and traveled in Spanish-speaking countries, and she was a big reader. After discovering the challenging kinds of things she liked to read, I asked if she might like to join my online book group, and she accepted, becoming an enthusiastic participant in our weekly discussions and a friend to all of us. I was very happy to be back in contact with her and to pick up on new points of shared interest. It also feels precious to have a few friends who knew my family and whose family I remember too, and to be able to talk about those early years as well as the present.

Ann was appreciative and supportive of my writing and my art, which reminded her of the pastoral landscape of where we had first lived. Even though the recent painting above is of Sicily, it’s the same idea — rocky upland fields, often a lone tree the farmer has left, blue summer skies with billowing clouds. She drove out to central New York to hear the talk I gave about my book, Snowy Fields, and told me about a road across from their family farmhouse that had a beautiful view and was a peaceful place treasured by her family. I drove up there on one of my trips to take care of my father’s house, and stood for a while listening to the wind and the birds, and appreciating the view of the familiar hills. Later I sent her a watercolor of that view.

She did amazingly well, health-wise, for considerably more than a decade, dealing bravely with setbacks during the last year, and continuing to participate in the book group almost every week, always seeming more concerned with others than with herself. When the end came a few days ago, it was unexpectedly quick. It was only after she died that I learned how involved she had been in food banks, preparing and delivering meals to those in need, as well as providing hospitality to friend and stranger alike. She was also very concerned about the welfare of children, and worked to address that — always in her quiet, unobtrusive way.

I will miss her very much, as will our group, and I hope to remember her courage, her generosity, and her example. May she rest in peace, with a gentle wind tossing the grasses and a beautiful summer sky overhead. Thank you, Ann, for being yourself, and for all the lives you touched, including mine.