Someone I knew...

It was a small blurb in the obituaries. Not even a paragraph long. Two sentences.

Eva Mae Sconce, 101, died today at so and so nursing home in Greenwood. Services none.

That was it. I scoured the papers from my hometown and the surrounding communities thinking that there would be more info somewhere, but there was nothing. I looked on the internet. I looked at new burials in Rest Haven Cemetery in my hometown. Nothing. That was it. Short and not even sweet.

I didn't really know Mrs. Sconce that well. But everyone in my hometown of Edinburgh knew of the house she and her husband lived in. A majestic old victorian home sitting atop a hill overlooking Main street. Her husband owned and operated the Pixie Theatre in downtown Edinburgh back when I was a child in the late 50's and early 60's. I remember his passing when I was in high school.

I knew Mrs. Sconce from two sources. First, she was a substitute teacher in the Edinburgh school systems as I grew up. Kids always talked about her behind her back, making fun of her cheaply dyed blue hair. No one really talked nicely about her around me. I was always curious about her though. She was quite an interesting dresser. She had old clothes, but they didn't look old. They looked vintage and regal. She wore antique looking old jewelry on her wrists and around her neck. She always wore dresses and heels. I only recall talking to her on two occasions in my life. Once, in seventh grade, she was teaching Algebra and I was struggling mightily (as I often did) with this whole x and y thing. She had two students come to the blackboard in front of the room and she would recite a problem and the students would race to see who completed it first. She called me up there and I was so afraid because I was completely lost in how to work these problems we were on. She read aloud the equation. I wrote it down on the board and pretended to solve it, not really knowing what the hell I was doing. Of course, by this time the other student had solved it and I quickly erased my chicken scratches from the board and hurried back to my seat. As the class was about to end, Mrs Sconce wrote 3 names on the board and announced that she would like to see these students after class. You guess it! My name was there.

I went up to her desk after class. She talked to the other students first - just some sort of housekeeping things with them - missing a paper or something. Then she turned to me and looked in my eyes and said to me, "I just wanted to talk to you about that problem on the board. Let's walk through it together." She walked me through the process, but she didn't do it like most teachers. She didn't say, "All right, now what do you do". (Thank goodness cause I sure as hell had no idea what the steps were!) Instead she said, "Here's how I would solve it. See if this helps you" I relaxed and watched. Then she did another one. She said again, "This one I would solve in a similar way." I watched her do it. It still didn't make sense to me - finding numerical values for letters - and I told her that. But by watching her and from her taking that extra time with me I was able to at least get a strategy in my head for how to solve these problems.

The other time I came in contact with her was at her house. I had to gather leaves from various trees and put them in a book for science class. Being a bit of a nature buff, I always noticed the unique trees in the Sconce's huge yard when I would ride my bicycle past their house on those lazy quiet Sunday mornings. In class, we were assigned 10 leaves to find in the woods and press them in a binder. We were handed drawings for each leaf on a blue stained mimeographed paper. Simple - just find leaves that match the design, glue it in your book and label it, put your name on it and turn it in. Sugar maple, Black oak, Sasafras, Elm - pretty easy stuff. But I kept thinking about those trees at the Sconce's. What were they? Did they match my school drawings? So, one day I helped myself into their yard and started picking leaves off the trees. None of them matched my project requirements! I was perplexed. Suddenly, I heard a voice that came out of nowhere. "That's a Horse Chestnut", she said. I looked up and Mrs. Sconce stood behind me with a smile on her face. I was so afraid I was in trouble. I was trespassing and got caught! Plus, I had picked perfectly good leaves from her tree. I told her sheepishly that I was sorry but that I had always seen trees in her yard unlike any others and wanted to see if they were on my assignment. She told me it was no problem at all. She then walked me around her yard and showed me all the trees whose names she knew by heart! She gave me leaf specimens for each of them too. I put them in my project - every one of them. Later that day I went to Cutsinger Bridge outside of town on my bike and found the more common leaves to satisfy the teachers assigned requirements. I was very proud of my binder. I got an A.

Thank you Mrs. Sconce. Rest in Peace.