WINDSOR — Nancy Nash-Cummings rebelled against the expectations of her upbringing, and her life blossomed on her own terms.
Co-creator of the advice column sensation “Ask Anne & Nan,” her endless determination also pushed her to co-found a newspaper and travel to over 40 countries — all while raising three kids and maintaining an busy social life.
“She just had backbone,” said Lucinda Walker, her eldest daughter, “She really had spirit.”
She carried that spirit to the end, opting to use Vermont’s medical aid in dying law to pick the day of her death, Sept. 1, just shy of her 84th birthday, and asking her family to make hers Windsor’s first green burial.
Born Sept. 10, 1941, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, Nash-Cummings’s early life was one that was certainly “of means,” said Walker, who lives in Brownsville, Vt.
It was bridled by social expectations about what a woman is and how she ought to live. “But she was never a box-fitter,” Walker said.
Still, she excelled at checking each of the boxes.
Nash-Cummings graduated from boarding school at St. Mary’s Hall in Minnesota in 1959. She earned a bachelor’s in early childhood development from Northwestern in 1963, the same year she married Tom Walker, with whom she had three children.
Nash-Cummings “did time” in Grosse Pointe, Mich., as she would say, teaching second grade for two years. Then she followed Walker, who began classes at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business, to Windsor in 1969.
“(Moving to Windsor) gave her a real freedom to really dig deep to figure out what made her happy,” Walker said.
She quickly began spreading tendrils throughout the town, beginning her “love affair with Windsor,” Walker said.
Becoming a Vermonter
In Vermont, she began stepping out from the traditional role of a woman. It was a transformation intensified by the divorce from her first husband.
She fit in with the culture of the state, especially with the friends she was meeting — who were “new agrarians,” Richard Cummings, her second husband, said.
“Suddenly she was making bread by hand. We had bulgur burgers instead of meat burgers. She was gardening,” Walker said. “You could tick the boxes, really, of all the things (new agrarians) did,” she said.
The family knew dinner was being prepared when Susan Stamberg, of National Public Radio’s All Things Considered, came on the radio. Then, the scraping of burnt toast meant dinner was almost ready.
“Oh my God, she just always burned things,” Walker said. “But she’d just scrape it off and you’d eat it. It was perfect.”
Nonetheless, she was a great cook, who loved trying and sharing new recipes, said Jean Burling, a retired superior court justice and the first woman to be a judge in the state of New Hampshire.
The two became “best friends” over the past 30 years or so, Burling said. They shared an interest in pursing equal rights for women.
With a welcoming smile, Nash-Cummings could attract friends as she “wanted to know immediately about you,” said Burling.
The extraordinary social life wasn’t simply a gift that Nash-Cummings had, but took place within “her own creed of being kind to people, to answer to needs that were apparent to her, to live in her community and do good,” Burling said.
‘A natural reporter’
After initially trying her hand at substitute teaching, Nash-Cummings moved to the Vermont adult learning center, and then to journalism.
Barney Crozier, a Rutland Herald reporter, thought she sounded intelligent and asked her to freelance for the Herald, and she embraced the challenge.
As a freelancer for the Herald, Nash-Cummings covered the Vermont State maximum security prison and joined a trucker for three days to Saginaw, Mich., to document the life of a truck driver, John Van Hoesen said.
The family knew that cigarette smoke meant she was under deadline, Walker said.
Van Hoesen co-founded the Windsor Chronicle with Nash-Cummings and two others. Van Hoesen later joined Vermont Public Radio, where he was chief content officer for a number of years.
“Her reporting, her curiosity and her engagement with life was contagious,” Van Hoesen said.
Genuinely curious and an engaging conversationalist, “she was a natural reporter,” Van Hoesen said. “It was quite a combination to work with her.”
The Windsor Chronicle was first published in 1974. The four founders believed that all communities should have their own newspaper, and decided to create one for Windsor.
“She was really the soul and the spirit of the paper, you know, often working into the early morning to get the paper off the ground,” Van Hoesen said.
In the paper’s early days, Nash-Cummings would report, photograph, develop film, paste up camera-ready pages, and then drive them to the Hunter Press in Weathersfield, Van Hoesen said.
She would be gone for 24 hours the day the paper came out, Walker recalled.
And while Nash-Cummings was doing all this work — alongside raising three children as a single mother — she co-founded the Windsor Nursery School and Kindergarten, taught at the Windsor Family Center, and was chair of the Windsor Public Library Book Committee. She also served on the board of Mount Ascutney Hospital and Health Center.
“I don’t know where she had the time, honestly,” Walker said.
Obstacles and opportunities
Her life was not without challenges. The divorce was difficult, dragging on for a number of years, ending in 1975. She faced social pressure to sell the big house, but this just made her more determined.
“She had this kind of rebellious spirit of, like, someone telling her she couldn’t do something, and it just made her focus,” Walker said.
And as the family shifted to wood heating for their home, Nash-Cummings told her kids to “wear a hat to bed,” which Walker now tells their own.
“But she did it herself. She wore a hat to bed,” Walker said.
Nash-Cummings hosted boarders, who paid rent and helped around the house and with child care.
Around this time, Burling recalled going to her house in Windsor in the fall, and asking “What is that noise?”
To which Nash-Cummings replied, “Oh, haven’t I told you? I’m raising turkeys in the basement — to sell at Thanksgiving time.”
Things changed quite a bit when she met Richard Cummings. “Rich became her focus,” Burling said. “And I don’t think there were any more turkeys in the basement.”
“We just clicked in a way that, you know, was just very satisfying,” Cummings, 74, said. “It just seemed natural.” In 1981, they got married.
‘Ask Anne & Nan’
In the early 1980s, after the sale of the Windsor Chronicle, Nash-Cummings and her friend Anne Adams thought to start an advice column, “Ask Anne & Nan.”
The two loved getting mail and energized each other, Walker said.
As editor of the Rutland Herald, Van Hoesen agreed to run the column in the paper, although he didn’t think anyone would write in.
Determined, the two were quickly dealing with “baskets of mail,” through which they received almost all of their questions.
Nash-Cummings was able to channel her incredible curiosity, passion and people-skills into the column. She found great joy in “making those phone calls and chatting with people all over his place. (…) And making friends,” Walker said.
And the feeling was mutual: “They would travel to libraries or towns to do talks. People got to know them, and then people felt comfortable asking these questions,” Walker said.
The column was something between “Ask Ann Landers” and “The Playboy Advisor” at the time, Walker said, though they would’ve liked to have been a bit more “spicy.”
In one of the most popular columns, the two explained how to poach salmon, wrapped in tinfoil, on the top rack of a dishwasher.
Another time, after writing about how to get armpit stains out of shirts, a reader from Texas sent in a batch of dirty shirts and said, “I tried all that, here’s these T-shirts. You get the G.D. stains out,” Cummings said.
At its peak, the column was syndicated by United Media and appeared in over 600 papers, including some internationals — like the Jerusalem Post, Walker said.
“They had books published, which I still use,” Walker said.
Through the column, she showed her kids first-hand “how to be socially comfortable, to question things,” Walker said.
The column lasted until the early 2000s, when questions began coming by email — and online search engines became more popular.
Life after the column
Following “Ask Ann & Nan,” Nash-Cummings announced that it was the “decade of travel,” Walker said.
She and Cummings, who bought a beach shack in the Bahamas in 1989, now traveled to 42 countries together — whether to India during catastrophic flooding or from Turkey, Egypt to Jordan during the Arab Spring Uprisings.
Around this time, she also fully embraced the role of grandparent, with a bit more time than she had with own kids.
While one might expect her activity to decrease as she aged, the only thing that slowed was the pace. Nash-Cummings would swim every day, whether in Windsor’s Kennedy Pond or in the Bahamas, even when “she shouldn’t have been swimming,” Cummings said.
It wasn’t until her cancer diagnosis in February that Nash-Cummings could be observed sitting for any length of time, Walker said.
At a certain point, the hospice doctor had to tell her that her physical activity — swimming, hiking, kayaking, etc. — was “depleting her” and that she just ought to take it easy.
“That was tough for her,” Walker said. But “it was all she could do.”
After attending a program at the Windsor Public Library, she decided that she wanted a green burial, in which a body decomposes naturally in the ground by minimizing non-biodegradable materials.
Her decision was in line with new agrarianism, Cummings said — what she loved so dearly about Windsor and Vermont.
“She kind of sprang it on us to some degree,” Walker said. Asking her three children and Richard to prepare and wash her body for the burial, where she would be put in a cotton shroud without embalming chemicals to allow for natural decomposition.
The request “felt very Nancy; felt very Mom,” Walker said. She asked a bit more from her family than they thought they could do and told them, “Oh, you’ll figure it out after I’m gone.”
With her health declining, “she really, I think, wanted to have control over, you know, the end,” Walker said. “This was a woman who never would have given up her agency.”
“And she did not want to be under fluorescent lights and hooked to tubes, and so she sat in the garden on a beautiful sunny day with us all around and took it,” Walker said.
Under Vermont’s Act 39, the Medical Aid in Dying Law, Nash-Cummings drank a lethal concoction “or ‘the potion,’ as we like to call it,” Walker said.
She was having a hard time swallowing, with a tumor in her esophagus, “But, boy, she chugged that thing down,” Walker said. “Like, it was incredible. Very, very Nan. Very Nancy.”
“O come, o sleep,” Nash-Cummings said.
She died in eight minutes.
“It felt like so her,” Walker said. “Because she just was so clear-eyed and steadfast and determined. She was fearless.”
She had a green burial, Windsor’s first, at the Glade in Ascutney Cemetery.
