WILDER — Eva Muller Smith would often look out the window at her home on Iris Way towards a little pond. She’d watch the ducks come through and paid attention to which birds would perch on the surrounding trees.
As each winter would melt into spring, the first delicate purples and yellows of crocus flowers would emerge. Smith would tell Anne French, her friend of two decades, to walk around the house and look at the blooms.
“She got a great deal of joy in observing the natural world,” said French, 77. “The first pussy willow was exciting (for her).”
Throughout her life, Smith, who died on Feb. 18 at the age of 97, found comfort in nature as she dealt with the challenges.
Smith grew up on a “country gentleman’s farm” in Rockland County, north of New York City near the Hudson River; land that her family owned but hired others to do the work. On the six-acre farm, there were vegetable gardens, flower gardens, apple trees, pear trees, chickens, pigs and cows.
Smith would often go to the barn, get some milk, and then leave the milk out to make fresh yogurt.
By the time the 1960s and 1970s rolled around, the suburban New York that Smith had come to know had changed dramatically.
Her life was changing too: she had separated from her husband in 1968. When the divorce was finalized in 1972, she moved to Haverhill with five of her children. Her two oldest were adults.
“Coming to the Upper Valley was, you might call it, a rebirth, a renaissance for her,” said Bonne DeSousa, Smith’s youngest daughter. “It was a new place, a life that she understood in a nature she knew something about.”
Smith was trying to make a life for herself and her family on her own terms but tangled with the social norms of the time, DeSousa said.
“She had to stop working with one of the real estate agents,” DeSousa said, “when the real estate agent learned she was divorced because the real estate agent believed she didn’t have enough money to buy a house.”
Eventually, Smith bought a house, but she had to be more circumspect about what she told people.
Those are the kinds of stories Smith and French would bond over, even though French was about 20 years younger than Smith.
“We would giggle about the absurdities of how we’d been raised,” French said. “Society wouldn’t give me a chance to do what my brothers did. It was a big joke if a little woman could do something.”
The 1930s and 1940s must have been hard for her, French said.
Born Eva Muller in 1921, her father owned a silk ribbon factory, and her mother was a poet. They would often play word games as a way to pass the time.
She received private tutoring for most of her childhood and then attended a college prep program at a girls school for two years before going on to design school.
During World War II, she worked for an engineering firm doing design drafting. Afterward, she got married, started a family, and focused on raising her children.
“All that creative intelligence, her inquiring mind. What do you do with that kind of intelligent energy?” French said.
Smith did find ways to express her creativity before moving to New Hampshire. She renovated the family home, sewed clothes for her family, and would make crafts at church.
“More than being stifled by it, she probably resented the superiority men would hold, or just being pigeonholed into a certain kind of role,” DeSousa said.
As she got older, Smith found different outlets for her creativity. In her 50s, she started working in stained glass, often times making geometric and floral lampshades.
In Haverhill, Smith had a stained glass studio attached to one of the barns on her property.
She put “hours of time a day into getting better and better at that,” DeSousa said. “The stained glass is kind of like a garden because you’re bringing different things together to make one whole piece.”
Smith continued with her stained glass when she moved to Hanover in the 1990s and then to Wilder in the 2000s.
She also always had gardens wherever she had lived, but the one on Rip Road in Hanover was bigger than the rest, filled with peonies, iris, rhubarb, tomatoes, basil, dill, and parsley.
But it wasn’t visible from the road, only from behind the house.
“It was very much, ‘This is my view.’ You’re in the center looking out, and what’s important is what’s out there,” DeSousa said.
That was Smith though, thinking about how she could leave the places she inhabited — her community, her neighborhood — better than she found them.
Another facet in her life was her time in Alcoholics Anonymous. For 50 years, Smith would attend the meetings, and in New Hampshire, she would often give rides to others in AA.
Her friends say Smith saw possibilities in people they didn’t know they had.
Smith also found ways to keep growing personally by spending time with others and reading constantly, well into her 90s, when she’d often need a magnifying glass to get through a book.
Sally Page saw Smith’s desire to learn and become her best self in her time at the Unitarian Universalist Church in Norwich; especially when the church’s women group would get together to talk about life’s big questions and small stories.
The group would get together in Page’s spacious living room: the walls are lined with family pictures, and all the women would sit on Page’s salmon-colored couches.
Often times, Smith would sit in deep silence, ruminating. That’s when her friends knew something good was coming.
“I wish I’d had a tape recorder to capture the pearls out of her mouth,” said Page. “She was a pragmatic woman. A no-frills kind of woman.”
That came through in the advice she’d give.
“If you were a little down when you were talking with her, she’d say, ‘Comb your hair, and act like you care,’” Page said. “She never got down on you for being sometimes kind of rotten or having an attitude.”
Other times at the women’s meetings, Joani Nierenberg, who sat next to Smith every meeting, would feel a sort of jiggle on the couch.
“She’d just be giggling to herself,” Nierenberg said.
This past February, a few weeks before Smith died, she called Page and asked, “Can we have a women’s group to talk about death?”
It was the most well-attended meeting of the group in months. Smith had suggested inviting a hospice worker to facilitate the discussion.
“She wasn’t fearful. She seemed very calm,” Nierenberg said.
Her friends say Smith’s greatest gift to them was how she lived her life.
“She gave me the power of example, how to grow old fiercely and kindly,” French said. “A fierce gentleness, yeah, maybe that would be it.”
Now, Page has a small painting of Smith as a child on one of her living room walls. It’s right above the spot where Smith would sit.
Page kept looking back at the frame throughout an interview.
“I think she was an angel, actually,” she said.
In the last six months of her life, Smith would sing a few lines of a nursery rhyme from her childhood, a song DeSousa had never heard from her mother before.
“You never know when someone is going to need your light as a lighthouse to find their way home,” Smith would sing.
Daniela Vidal Allee can be reached at dallee@vnews.com or 603-727-3211.