I have been teaching kindergarten for thirty-eight years. I have had, by my rough count, approximately eight hundred and forty students move through my classroom. I know their names. I remember their faces. I remember who was afraid of the fire drill and who cried the first week and who made everyone laugh without trying to.
I retired last June. My class threw me a party with a cake that said “We Will Miss You Mrs. Patterson” in green frosting, which is my favorite color and which they remembered because I had mentioned it precisely once in September.
I went home that afternoon and sat on my back porch and felt something I had not expected to feel as strongly as I did: grief. Not for what I was losing, exactly, but for what I was leaving. The specific, daily grief of someone stepping away from the thing that has organized and given meaning to their time for four decades.
My husband Gary brought me a glass of iced tea and sat beside me and did not say anything, which was right.
Three weeks into retirement, a letter arrived in my mailbox. It was handwritten, on lined notebook paper, in the careful handwriting of someone who does not write letters often but had decided to try.
It was from a young man named Marcus. He had been in my kindergarten class twenty-two years earlier. He was twenty-seven years old now. He had found my address through the school district’s alumni office and he had written to tell me something.
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