This note is a first tribute to my mother, Nancy Jack Todd, who died peacefully at home in the evening of May 30, in sunlight, with John and her grandson Max holding her hands.

Other obituaries and tributes will talk about her central work as a documenter of the seminal environmental work of New Alchemy and Ocean Arks International, the awards she received, the books she wrote, and the journals - The Journal of the New Alchemists and Annals of Earth — that she edited.

But I remember most that she loved to dance, she loved her garden, and she loved John more than anything.

As her oldest child, I first remember her as a fierce peace activist in Ann Arbor, Michigan during the Viet Nam war. Some of my earliest memories are of marches she took me to. Joan Baez and Ian and Sylvia and Pete Seeger were the soundtracks of my early childhood (I was sure Pete Seeger lived in our speakers). Pete Seeger was a fan of hers in turn - he was an enthusiastic subscriber to Annals of Earth. One day I came home to our house on Cape Cod and there was Pete Seeger on the porch.

Another big fan of hers was anthropologist Margaret Mead, who took her and my dad to Bali, because she was so happy to see such a strong husband and wife team “in the business.” And there were so many more.

In the last years she has been slipping away into a place where time is organized differently and where vision recedes. By this past year my dad had become her whole world. I have a strong mental image of her curled up like a dormouse inside a soap bubble, with my dad wrapping himself around the bubble from the outside, holding it in his embrace.

The last time I saw my mother, this past January, the night before I left I went to say goodnight to her. She turned and smiled her full-out radiant beam of delight and love on me. That smile sent me right back to early childhood, before my memories were even explicit, to the feeling of being bathed in her love. What a blessing. What a home to return to!

-Rebecca Todd