Annick Porter

1936 - 2023

Annick Porter

Amherst, MA - Annick Porter, beloved mother, grandmother, and friend, died December 3, 2023. It was her dear departed husband's birthday. She would have cooed at the coincidence. Annick was 87. Annick and Dennis were partners, parents and soulmates for more than sixty years.

Annick was no shrinking violet. Like her favorite fictional English women, she was redoubtable. Her family and friends treasured her for it. To her clients, she was the interior architect and designer extraordinaire, possessing an understanding of rooms, light, color, and materials, who wowed residences, offices, and boutiques into functional, flowing, fun, sleek or cozy, always elegant spaces. The Pioneer Valley to the Florida coast is dotted with homes endowed with her elan. To her colleagues, Annick was generous, fair, and effusive in praise. To those who manned her favorite haunts, she was convivial, respectful, and loyal. At one supermarket, the staff voted her Customer of the Year twice in a row, then eliminated the award; maybe they feared a dynasty.

To her friends, Annick was one of a kind, vibrant, giving and appreciating, adoring yet direct, self-effacing but unapologetic, an excellent cook and epicurean chum. To her relatives in France and England, she was faithful and indefatigable, saving her pennies for annual voyages to visit them. She journeyed to distant Japan multiple times, lastly when she was eighty. She would do anything for her kin.

To her grandchildren, Annick was MamCoz, the Breton grandmother she had longed to become. She went to the ends of her earth to find presents to make them happy, a grandmother all children would be lucky to have. MamCoz made them laugh, too, because she was a zany original and they cherished her for it. To her daughters-in-law, Annick was arms wide open, an unconditional welcome. She celebrated their qualities and successes with a mother's pride. To her three sons, she was love itself. She was their accented French mother in an anglophone American scape, eccentric, a force of nature, inexhaustibly giving, whose encouragement was unwavering, whom they grew to admire as a talented, intelligent, and singular human being in her own right.

Annick Françoise Leitner was born December 1, 1936, the youngest child and only daughter of Jean-Marie Leitner and Gabrielle Leitner (née Delimont), in Bordeaux, France. Four years of Nazi occupation during her childhood profoundly affected her. She suffered the abrupt disappearance of neighbors and the clopclop echoes of goose-steps outside her home on the cobblestone Rue St. Catherine. But Annick reveled in small acts of defiance, like when she hurled cupfuls of water from the fifth floor onto swaggering enemy soldiers below. The first time she recalled meeting her father, a surgeon in the Free French Forces, was after the war ended; she was nine. She would attribute her family devotion, in part, to that long cold absence.

In school, Annick excelled at languages. She relished the timbre of ancient Greek, but it was English and a high-school trip to the Albion isle that changed her life. She was besotted with the country, its verdant landscape, nestled villages, wit, aesthetics, and literature. Annick was a gifted musician who played classical piano from the age of three to fifteen and sang in a traveling choir. When she finally owned a piano again in her sixties, we were amazed to hear her nimble digits dance the keyboard for the first time in fifty years. Annick had wanted to become a surgeon, which perhaps accounted for her unnerving delight in removing splinters from little boys' toes, but circumstances didn't allow, so she enrolled at the National School of Modern Oriental Languages in Paris to study Chinese. Though the ideograms fascinated, her drive was elsewhere, so she returned to Bordeaux.

In a café in 1960, she met Dennis Porter, future academic, aspiring writer, English teacher. Tout de suite, she shed her American beatnik boyfriend in favor of the Englishman. Married within the year, they moved to Wimbledon for some Elysian months before bounding to Berkeley California, where she bore three boys. Annick would make some of her most enduring friendships during their decade there. In 1971, Dennis obtained a professorship at UMASS, so they moved to Amherst, which, while not the arcadia of her anglophiliac dreams, was at least closer in longitude and vista. In her mid thirties, she embarked on a career when she entered the university to pursue interior design. For someone whose vocation didn't blossom until middle age, Annick Porter built a remarkable career.

Annick, Mom, MamCoz is dearly missed by those she leaves behind: her three sons, their wives, four grandchildren, her older brother, her cousin, nieces, nephews, and friends.