Member-only story
A Midsummer’s Education
A widow turned schoolteacher receives a lesson of her own.
It had been a year since Emily Sondheim’s husband died of a heart attack in the fields of their farmstead. Not long after, she had sold the land with its little rundown home and barn as well as all the animals with it; the only things she had kept were a trunk of her clothes, a worn diary from her schoolhouse days, and a threadbare Bible her husband had always kept in his nightstand drawer. Then Emily took to a room above Mrs. Laverne’s tavern before finding work as an assistant to a school marm to supplement the sum she lived on following her husband’s death.
Midsummer had come again, and with it arrived a stray shower of tears as Emily ran her hand over the Bible.
“You were a good man,” she whispered. “But I wonder if you ever knew what it was like to have a wife. You thought so much of yourself and your living that there was barely any room for me left. And now you’re gone — so what’s left?”
She shook her head, a few more tears slipping down her cheek, before she sequestered the Bible away to a drawer where it would likely sit for another year. A memento of a time passing her by, a love that her parents had drawn her into when she had been too young to know any better.
