The Canoe in Room Six

What Was in Room 6

I need to tell you what was in that room, or none of the rest will make sense.

First, the canoe. In the fall of 1997, a farmer named Orrin Nygaard, whose grandson Travis was in my class, brought an old sixteen-foot fiberglass canoe to school on a flatbed. It had a crack in the hull and had not touched water in years.

“Thought you could use it for something,” he said. “Or burn it.”

Everett and I cut it in half that Saturday with a borrowed saw. We set the bow half in the corner on four wooden skids, lined it with a foam cushion I covered in yellow duck cloth, and clipped a little lamp to the side.

Children called it the Boat. If you had finished your work, you could take a book and climb into the Boat, and nobody could bother you until the timer went off. For twenty-eight years, kids who had no quiet place at home had one in the front corner of Room 6.

Second, the cabinet. In 1991 I bought a gray steel four-door supply cabinet at the co-op auction for forty dollars, because the district had no line for it.

It held mittens, hats and socks. It held granola bars, toothbrushes, shoelaces, hair ties, a sewing kit, birthday candles, and a tin of sugar cookies on Fridays. By my best count I spent about thirty-one hundred dollars of my own money on that cabinet over the years, and I would not take a dime of it back.

Nobody was ever told what it was for. A child who came in January in canvas sneakers would simply find a pair of dry wool socks in her cubby. We never made a speech.

Third, the letters.

On the last day of school every June, I had each child write me a letter. It could be about anything: the year, the Boat, the time somebody threw up in the pencil sharpener. I read every one that night. Then through July, at my kitchen table, I wrote each child back by hand and mailed it.

The ones they sent me, I kept. Thirty-eight years of them, in six gray banker boxes against the back wall of the closet. About eleven hundred letters.

I remembered him. I wrote back the same week.

All of it was in the dumpster. I will say that plainly, because for the first hour I could not.

I put my two flat boxes in the back of Everett’s truck, drove home, and fed my husband his supper.