Ann Miller memorial
She married Walter in 1958 She married Walter in 1958 and they had two children, Claire and Tom.
She was an avid reader, and her students loved literature thanks to her
Asheville in the 1940s was a town of porches and church bells, and Ann was the eldest of four. She learned early what it meant to be needed. She braided Agnes's hair before school, minded the two youngest, and was usually the one sent to find whoever had wandered off. On Sundays she walked to church in a clean dress with her sister Agnes on one side and their cousin Edith on the other, the three of them holding hands the whole way, as if the road might otherwise lose one of them. Years later she would say that was the first time she understood that holding on is a kind of love.
She began teaching second grade at twenty-three, in a brick schoolhouse with a coal stove and a window that never quite closed. She stayed thirty-one years. Her classroom smelled of chalk, oranges and wet wool in winter. She kept a jar of buttons on her desk, and any child who had a hard day was allowed to choose one and keep it in a pocket until things got better. Former pupils, grown and grey themselves, would stop her in the grocery store to tell her they still had the button. She never remembered which one she had given them, but she always remembered what the day had been.