Anna Greta Pearson

My mom, Anna, or as I called her, Momcat, was admitted to hospice on Friday, February 21, and succumbed to cancer on Monday, February 24.She was born in 1947 in Fort Riley Kansas, an army brat whose parents were never settled long in one location, she and her sister Harriet, and her father, Walter and mother Gladys, lived in many locations throughout the U.S. and even in the Black Forest of Germany. Her family eventually settled on a rural property and small farm in Heber Springs, Arkansas where my mother began highschool. Life took a tragic turn when her mother and father each passed from cancer within a year of each other, at only 49 and 50 years old. At that time, she and her sister were sent to Southern California to live with an uncle and his family. After graduating from high school, she attended UC Riverside where she majored in French. She spent her Junior Year abroad at the University of Bordeaux and lived with a French family. She met my father Allan at UC Riverside where he was a young teacher of Literature and Languages. After marriage, they moved to New Mexico in 1971. She spent the next 6 years in Santa Fe in a beautiful South Capital home on Don Cubero.

In 1977 the marriage ended and my mother eventually moved back to Riverside, California to be closer to her sister. There she began her library career. In 1983 she and her sister came to Santa Fe with a moving truck and moved me and our dog Figaro and several cats back to California as well. She was a generous and devoted single mom for those years before college. Eventually she took a job at the AK Smiley Library in Redlands and purchased her first home there, where she lived until her retirement in 2018. She then returned to Santa Fe to be closer to me. In 2022 my husband Shaun and I got married and we moved Momcat in with us at our newly purchased home (and animal sanctuary), in Glorieta. She spent her days reading Hillerman mysteries, feeding the tortoise and the chickens, watching the pigs graze, and the fluffy white clouds float across the beautiful blue skies surrounded by cats. The house feels very empty without her.