Eleanor “Ellie” Marsh

I was born in Akron in the spring of 1938, the middle of three girls, in a house that smelled of bread on Fridays and rubber the rest of the week, because everything in Akron did then. My father set tires at the plant and my mother took in mending, and between them they taught me the two things I kept my whole life: do the work in front of you, and set a good table even when the week has been thin. I met Thomas Marsh at a church picnic in 1957. He spilled lemonade on my shoes and apologized so many times that I married him, mostly so he would stop.

For thirty-four years I taught third grade, most of them in the same room, second door past the library. Third grade is the year children learn cursive and long division and how to apologize like they mean it, and I considered all three my subjects. I taught the children of my first students, and by the end I had taught a few of their children too. People ask what I remember most and they expect me to say a name, but it is this: the particular quiet of twenty-six pencils moving at once, on a morning in October, with the radiator ticking. There is not much in this world I would trade for that.

The garden started as four tomato plants the summer we bought the house on Maple Street, and by the time I was done with it, it had opinions of its own. I grew what we ate and handed the rest over the fence, which is what a fence is for. And on Sundays we had dinner, all of us, whoever was in town and whoever they brought. I set the table for twelve because that was every leaf we owned, and somebody always made thirteen work. If you were ever the thirteenth chair at my table, know this: you were not an inconvenience. You were the point.