Ann Miller memorial

She sang alto in the church choir for fifty years and was, by common agreement, the loudest and most confident singer in the second row, whether or not she had the right verse. She laughed easily and completely, with her whole face. She believed that a good story should be told slightly wrong, on purpose, so that someone could correct it and the telling could go on for another hour. She believed in thank-you notes, in second helpings, and in the healing power of a very strong cup of coffee before any difficult conversation.

She had a way of arriving. When a neighbour was ill, a casserole appeared on the step with no note. When a former pupil lost a job, a letter came, handwritten, saying only that she had always known he would be fine and would he like to come for supper on Thursday. She kept a calendar by the telephone in which every birthday in the county seemed to be written, in pencil, with a small star beside the ones that were hard years. Nobody ever asked how she knew which ones those were.

Walter died on a grey afternoon in March, a week after his clocks had all stopped keeping time and no one could explain why. Ann wound each of them again, one by one, and decided to keep them running. For the next twenty-five years the house ticked and chimed around her, a little out of step with itself, and she said it was good company. She grew quieter in those years, but not smaller. She wrote letters by hand to anyone who had ever mattered to her and kept the replies in a shoebox that her granddaughter Claire now keeps in her kitchen.