A woman who barreled through life, who blanketed her family in devotion and who lived for the laugh, Cheryl Bowen of Upton died May 5th of Alzheimer’s Disease. She was a city girl born in Newton, MA who yearned for the country and a life with animals that would lead her to be a veterinarian technician, an avid horseback rider, and a sled dog racer, which is how she met her husband of 52 years, Peter Bowen. Bearing a deep empathy she inherited from her mother and an unbridled humor passed from her father, she was fast to the joke and had a raucous laugh that would ring out anywhere from family gatherings to restaurants to the aisles of department stores. In quiet times, she savored the serenity of The Cottage—the New Hampshire lakeside home built by her father and often ornamented by rainbows she relished. Cheryl was a maternal force at once both nurturing and bearing protective skills no foreign agency could ever replicate. She leaves her son Jared of Boston and daughter Becky of Milford. Her grandchildren Dylan, Reagan and Riley brought her immeasurable delight. Cheryl was a prolific memory-maker with joy that stretched from the home she built to the gardens she tended to the Emerald Isle where, in a late-in-life trip to Ireland, the woman who was never much for alcohol, developed an abiding taste for Guinness. Cheryl, always with the surprise. She is also survived by her beloved siblings Michael and Sharon, son-in-law Christopher, her best friend, Jeanette, and several cousins and nephews and nieces.