Anne Borders Lynch died in her sleep on Jan. 31, in Weston, in a snowy New England winter. She was born to Karl Borders and Mary Gayle Borders on August 16, 1917 in Manila in a hot Philippine summer. A teacher, Anne Lynch lived life broadly, with an active commitment to universal peace and social justice and to progressive politics. Her generous spirit ran through many deep friendships at home and around the world.

With family roots in Kentucky, Anne attended 12 schools before she graduated from high school. Part of her childhood was spent in Russia, the subject of her book, Two Years in Russia: 1925-1927. During her youth, Anne lived in Chicago where she attended the Francis W. Parker School, whose Deweyan education had a profound effect and which was the source of lifelong friendships. As a teenager in the thirties, Anne made the first of what became yearly visits to Martha’s Vineyard, the place with which she had the longest continuous connection. Anne graduated from the University of Chicago in 1940 with a bachelor of arts degree in United States history and went on to earn a master’s in education from another school inspired by Dewey and Parker, the Graduate Teachers College of Winnetka, Ill., beginning her career as a reading specialist. She also studied music at the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore.

In 1941, after a courtship of a few short weeks, Annie married fellow Parkerite Kevin Lynch, who would become a noted urban planner. Following the war, they moved to the Boston area, and by the fifties the young family had settled in Watertown. In 1961, when the Cambridge Friends School was founded, Annie was involved as a reading tutor, and she worked at CFS until her retirement in 1996, making valuable contributions to the school and numerous friendships. While raising a family and teaching, Annie was deeply involved in social activism. She loved to travel, and, in addition to her childhood years in Russia, she lived together with her family in Florence, Italy from 1952 to 1953 and in London, England between 1968 and 1969. Over the years she took many trips in Europe, as well as trips to Russia and China. Annie returned from Florence with a guitar whose inlay fascinated her children and with the recipe for a delicious red sauce. In London, she took lessons in weaving, and she continued to weave into her later life. Her travel diaries are full of the pressed flowers she collected on her walks. She delighted in the natural world and all of its creatures, wild and domesticated. The arts were an important part of Annie’s life. She drew and painted; she loved literature and music. Singing was a special joy, and she had a beautiful soprano voice.

It was Sarah Greenabaum, a teacher at Francis Parker, who introduced Annie, as well as her brother Bill and other Parker students including Kevin, to the Vineyard in the 1930s. The first visit was followed by others on the Great White Way above Menemsha at the big house next to those of friends Leo Huberman, Sybil May and Paul Sweezy. From these beginnings, and with the addition of many other friends, grew a remarkable group who summered every year on the Island. Over the years, Annie’s family stayed with friends in Chilmark and in houses in West Tisbury, among them that of her mother. Mary Borders bought a house on Music street in 1953 and within a few years began to live there year-round. She had been widowed just before buying the Music street house and scattered her husband Karl’s ashes on Menemsha Pond. When Mary died in 1981, her ashes in turn were buried in the West Tisbury Cemetery, to be joined in 2008 by those of her daughter in law, Bill’s wife, Frances Borders. In the early sixties, Kevin designed and built by hand a house on Lobsterville Road in what was then Gay Head. From then on, Annie lived in that house with family and guests every summer until 2008.

Annie loved the texture of the Island, especially the view from Middle Road just before Beetlebung Corner, out over the cow dotted fields to South Beach and the ocean beyond. Expansive landscapes and skies, be they from the beach at Blue Mail Box during the West Tisbury days or at West Basin, where she swam each late afternoon in Aquinnah, resonated with the open prairies she had lived in as a child in Russia. Summer guests remember Annie’s many stories about the Island and descriptions of the people who had lived in places on the way up-Island. Each August the fair at the bottom of Music street brought the horses that Annie loved to see. She enjoyed the sound of the whippoorwills in Gay Head and watched each year as the phoebes returned to nest under the eaves until their hatchlings fledged. Annie produced memorable meals for her family and guests. She relished in particular endless corn-on-the-cob, fresh from Kevin’s garden at the bottom of the hill behind the house in Aquinnah. Kevin died in the house he built in April, 1984, having come to prepare that summer’s garden. Annie buried his ashes at the top the Aquinnah cemetery looking out to the Elizabeth Islands.

In addition to her husband Kevin, Anne was predeceased by a niece, Alice Borders, and by her sister in law, Frances Borders. Anne leaves behind her four children: David; Laura and her husband, Hans Peters; Catherine of Chaplin, Conn.; and Peter and his wife Jessica, of Shoreham, Vt. Anne is also survived by her brother, William Borders of Chevy Chase, Md.; three grandchildren, Sophia, Ian and Micah; a niece, Mary Borders; a grandniece, Cynthia Grimes; and three nephews, Terrence, Richard and Timothy together with their families.

Memorial contributions may be made to Cambridge Friends School, 5 Cadbury Road, Cambridge, MA 02140; Francis W. Parker School, 330 West Webster Ave., Chicago, IL 60614; the Vineyard Open Land Foundation, P. O. Box 4608, Vineyard Haven, MA 02568; or to an organization of your choice working for peace and social justice.

A memorial for Anne B. Lynch will take place at the Cambridge Friends Meeting House, 5 Longfellow Park, Cambridge, Mass., on April 30 at 1 p.m. There will be a family burial in Aquinnah in August.