Sue Hubbell, "who wrote quietly penetrating books and essays about her life as a beekeeper, a curious wanderer and a divorced woman navigating middle age," died October 13, the New York Times reported. She was 83. Hubbell "examined the natural world and her own experiences for insights into relationships, self-reliance and, as she put it in A Country Year, 'where we older women fit into the social scheme of things once nest building has lost its charm.' "
Her books include A Country Year: Living the Questions (1986); A Book of Bees... and How to Keep Them (1988); Far-Flung Hubbell: Essays From the American Road (1995); and Waiting for Aphrodite: Journeys Into the Time Before Bones (1999).
In August, Hubbell, who had been dealing with dementia, was found by searchers 14 hours after she had wandered away from her home in Milbridge, Maine. She subsequently moved in with her son, Brian, who told the Times: "Sue decided that she strongly wished not to descend into dementia under indefinite institutional care. So, on the morning of Sunday, September 9, she ate her last grapefruit and informed her friends and doctor that she intended to stop eating and drinking. She stuck to her plan and died 34 days later, increasingly lucid through the last few days."
"In the end, Sue Hubbell died as she had lived--her way," the Bangor Daily News wrote, adding that a 1998 edition of the newspaper had a feature about Hubbell in which "she was described as not only a hardcore writer, but also a chainsaw kind of woman who liked, bugs, earthworms, katydids and sea sponges and referred to her writing style as biology for English majors. She also wrote about pies, toothpick factories, magicians, truck stops and the National Bowling Hall of Fame."