Maria

In Barrio Pezuela Puerto Rico, during WWII, a barefoot girl in her only ragged shift tended her father’s scrawny chickens and bony cow. She had been born in that struggling hamlet a day’s walk outside Lares at the start of the depression. Maria limped from an ailment (polio, undiagnosed and untreated) that had long kept her bedridden—one of twelve in two rooms; the one who hadn’t been able to pull her own weight. They called her ‘Tata.’ In her grandmother’s house, her refuge, they watched the planes headed for Miami, silver birds flying away to America. Just before grandmother died, Maria told her she wanted to go there too. Maria Pelegrina Caban left Mayaguez in 1950 for a new life in America. She landed at Idewyde (now JFK) in winter to never before seen snow flurries, in a second hand cotton sundress and coarse sandals. Alone and bewildered in Spanish Harlem, she found assistance in others who’d left the island before. Now free to be a new person, vivacious and flirtatious, she thrilled to the life of a city unimaginable in the poverty and strife of the village home she’d left for the last time at fifteen; the entire world she’d left behind. The nanny work she’d performed since the age of twelve supported her, that and fine embroidery and sewing: piecework jobs in Soho sweatshops. These skills she refined and enjoyed for the rest of her life. Maria met her first husband Theodore Norton, a blue-eyed rake, while out dancing. Together they had her first child Eric, a baby of her own to love after years of raising the children of others. Tragically widowed early in the marriage and without support from her late husband’s family, she and Eric became nomads in New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Connecticut, seeking a safe and permanent home. A resolute and creative survivor throughout, she found that home in Westerly, RI. There, she met Thomas Thorpe, a thoughtful younger man drawn to her beauty and uniqueness; Maria’s tempestuousness was a foil for Tom’s Yankee circumspection. They married quickly. Tom and Perry (her nickname then) gave Eric a brother, Henry two years later, and added 3rd child Eddie ten months after that.  After having raised their boys into strong and capable men, she and Tom made a new smaller nest in a cheerful compact cottage with a sunny garden. Surrounded by the bees and butterflies she adored, Maria pursued gardening in a jumbled naturalistic style that reflected her sometimes raucous informality. As always, she continued her penchant for frankness; her quips and observations noted for their insight as much as their audacity. The last stop of her long journey brought Maria and Tom nearer to two of her boys—and importantly, a passel of grandchildren—in Middletown, NJ., close by the ocean she’d flown across a half century before. Struggling with chronic health problems in their later years, she and Tom persevered together as they always had in what would ultimately be a fifty-seven-year marriage; each the others steadfast if not always steady support. Maria Pelegrina Thorpe died peacefully early on March 28, 2018 in her 88th year,  safe and secure in the love of her husband and family that had always sustained her. She lives on in the hearts of husband Thomas Taylor Thorpe; children Eric Norton, Henry Thorpe and Edward Thorpe; daughters-in-law Sandy Thorpe and Tammy Norton; grandchildren and all those fortunate to have known her.