Haig-Brown Institute

Memories of Ann ~ 

            I have read the preceding reflections on Ann with much interest and appreciation. I was so fortunate to have had this caring, community minded person play such a vital role in my life…but I can also only write as a friend. Reflecting on her life is east for me. I have only to look outside my windows and see the lily of the valley, the periwinkle, the hyacinth which came from her garden to mine…the herbs she shared from her triangular herb patch beneath her kitchen window. I look into my cupboards and see the plates she gave me at Christmas, topped with a freshly baked pudding…the souvenirs she brought back from Tuscany and Assisi. She loved the town of St. Francis but then why wouldn’t she? She was a ‘Francis’ herself…she took in the homeless, clothed the naked, fed the hungry, gave money to the poor, shared herself and her home.

            We met at the old St Patrick’s Church (just across the highway from the Haig-Brown House) in the early sixties. It was a Friday afternoon and I was washing windows in the church when Ann walked in with a huge armful of flowers. We started chatting and although there might have been a generation between us, we seemed to be of one mind.

            It was the beginning of many lively discussions which continued for some thirty years, right up to the day before she died when we had our last chat at her hospital bed. We criticized the various governments, the Church, the social systems, deplored the women’s situations, worried about teenagers, exchanged recipes, reviewed books, quoted our favorite poems and so on. She introduced me to much and I learned much. She was a ‘doer’, as we know, and when she saw a lack she filled it. She formed “Women in Crisis” because she saw the need for a support group for mothers and wives who needed advice and direction, and this was years before support groups were popular. Ann had a deep rooted faith and it went far beyond the formal spiritual exercise and retreats we attended together. She was a woman of prayer and all her good works, be it saving trees or water or people, were scripture based and for her “there was  no longer master or slave, male or female.” She treated every single being with great dignity and every single created thing with great reverence.

            When her husband died she told me that the world had remained the same…there were still things to enjoy but it was like looking at a black and white TV; the colour had gone from her life. I remembered those words when she passed away because I too felt that a beautiful light had gone from my life.

            It was fitting that our contact ended at St Patrick’s where it had begun, thirty years earlier. As I helped carry her casket out of the Church, I thanked the Lord for giving me this friend who gave me so much. I miss you, Ann.

Mary Roberts