My Grandmother Mary "Pep" Hinkey died this week at the age of ninety-six. If you are a reader of this humble blog then you are privy to her year and a half quest to leave this mortal toil(epluribusmarvus.blogspot.com/2015/06/when-dying-just-doesn't-work-out).
It's been a battle of wills, matching her tired soul against a body that defines the Energizer Bunny. Well she got her wish, death is undefeated.
She was born Mary Roberts Taylor on April 20th, 1919. Her life began on her family's farm on the banks of the Delaware River in southern New Jersey. She was one of six kids born to a deeply rooted Quaker family that traces beginnings in this country to 1677. I have a copy of a family history her mother wrote. In it her mother tries to pinpoint the time when they began to call Mary "Pepper". The moniker came because of fierce tantrums she threw as a young child. Eventually it was shortened to Pep, and stuck. That fire and energy came to define her.
Pep died as a member of her beloved commune, surrounded by the people she loved and the Catskill Mountains she cherished. Her choice to join the group with my Grandfather in the nineteen fifties, and to stick with it when he left, had lifelong consequences for her and all of us who followed. There is no doubt that her stubborn streak played a part in all of that, but was also a driving force that kept her going. In spite of the broken relationships I will choose today to celebrate the spirit she lived with.
On New Years Day in 2009 at the age of 90 she went sledding, I saw it with my own eyes. We rigged a lawn chair to a sled and tied two ropes front and back to control her speed and keep her upright. The plan was a snowy walk in the woods but on the first corner we came to the sled flipped, and down she went. Of course we were horrified. But by the time we could get her back in the seat she was laughing hysterically. And that was just the beginning. What followed at her insistence was actually sledding down hills, free of rope tethers. And doing spins across the ice of a frozen pond. That afternoon became one of my favorite moments in her later years.
As a young girl she developed a life threatening lung infection that sent her to the Pocono Mountains for a summer of rest. Her mother's book tells of her spending the summer sunbathing and eating homemade ice cream. That was the beginning of a life long obsession with ice cream; specifically homemade peach or Philly Vanilla, from Stewart's, a popular convenience store chain in New York's Hudson Valley. If you failed to stop at Stewart's for a couple half gallons before visiting her you were going to hear about it. On the last day of her life she had an afternoon bowl of ice cream with a friend. That night at dinner she turned her plate upside down so they would stop offering her food. She died shortly after dinner which means her last meal was a fitting one. Last night I had a bowl of ice cream in her honor.
