Margaret Ellen Hayes

Margaret spent seventy-nine years making ordinary days feel like something worth keeping. She was born in a small mill town, the second of five, and learned early that a full table and an open door could hold a family together through anything.

For thirty-one years she taught second grade, and there is a whole generation in this county that still remembers the sound of her reading aloud. She retired to her garden, her crossword, and a rotating cast of grandchildren who knew that her back door was never really locked.

She loved deeply and quietly — in casseroles left on porches, in birthday cards that always arrived a day early, in the way she remembered every name. She is gone now, but the habits of kindness she planted are still coming up all over the place.