The Shoebox My Teacher Kept

The Box on the Top Shelf

My name is Carol, and I am fifty-nine years old, and I did not think a shoebox could take the legs out from under a grown woman until it did.

Miss Rowe passed this spring. Audrey Rowe. She had taught fourth grade in our town in east-central Indiana for thirty-six years, and then she lived another two decades after that in the same little house behind the Methodist church.

She never married and never had children of her own, which the town said in a pitying way for as long as I can remember. The town was wrong about that, the way towns usually are.

Her nephew called a handful of us the week after the service. He had a key to her old classroom, which the district had let her keep because nobody had the heart to ask for it back. He said there were boxes, and he could not do it alone, and would some of her students come help.

Five of us came. We were in our fifties and sixties now. We stood in a room built for people four feet tall and did not know where to put our hands.

The desks were the same. The pencil sharpener bolted to the window frame was the same. The little coat closet along the back wall with the sliding door that always stuck was the same.

I pulled that door and it stuck, and I laughed, because of course it did.

On the top shelf, back behind a wall of folded construction paper and a dented coffee can of brads, there was a shoebox. Red and white. A brand of boy’s dress shoes they had not sold in forty years.

The corners were soft and furred from handling. Somebody had opened and closed that box a great many times.

I took it down because it was in my way, honestly. I set it on a desk and I lifted the lid, and the smell came up at me first. Paste and crayon wax and old paper and a little chalk, the exact smell of being nine.

Inside were get-well cards. Dozens of them, standing on edge, filed in a row like records in a sleeve.

The first one I touched was a folded piece of blue construction paper with a crooked sun on it and the words GET WELL CAROL in block letters that leaned downhill.

I had made the sun myself. No. Somebody had made it for me. I had received that card in a hospital bed fifty years ago, and here it was, kept.

I sat down in a child’s chair with my knees up around my chest and I cried in front of four people I had not seen since the Carter administration.