Ann Miller memorial

In 1958 she married Walter, a quiet man who repaired clocks and talked to them while he worked. He came with two small children and a life that needed someone who would not be frightened of it. She was twenty-two and frightened of almost nothing except being thought unkind. The children, wary at first, took to calling her Saturday Mom, because Saturday was the day she baked, and the day nobody was allowed to be in a hurry. The name stayed long after they were grown. The house filled until the porch could hold no more chairs.

The garden began as a single row of tomatoes and grew, over sixty years, into something closer to a conversation with the weather. She walked it at dawn with her coffee, in her husband's old cardigan, naming everything that had survived the night. Roses by the fence, peonies along the path, a lemon tree in a pot that had no business living in North Carolina and did anyway. In the evenings she played Chopin, never perfectly and never apologising, with the window open so the neighbours could listen if they wished. Margaret next door said that half the street learned to love nocturnes through a screen door.