I don’t know why I’m posting this, maybe because I haven’t slept and my head won’t stop playing the scene back. It’s 2:15 AM and the house is quiet, but every time I close my eyes, I see my mother’s hands. They are thin now, spotted with age, and they shake just a little bit when she’s nervous. Last Friday, they were shaking so hard I thought she might drop the walker.

My mother, Gloria Henson, taught first grade at Grant Elementary for 34 years. She was the kind of teacher who didn’t just care about reading scores. She cared about the wet, freezing reality of being a six-year-old in a Nebraska winter. She kept a stash of spare socks in her desk drawer, and she checked every single child’s boots before the afternoon bell rang, ignoring the principal when he told her it wasn’t in the lesson plan.

I grew up watching her come home with chalk dust in her hair and a weary sort of kindness in her eyes. I thought that was just what mothers did. I didn’t realize until much later that she was giving away pieces of her own life to keep other people’s children warm.

Last Friday was supposed to be a simple, quiet event. Mrs. Paloma Flores, the school secretary who had been there since the dawn of time, called and told me they were dedicating a new, heated bus shelter for the kids.

She insisted my mother needed to be there. Mama didn’t want to go. She kept saying her knees were acting up and that nobody wanted to see an old woman with a walker cluttering up the sidewalk.

“They don’t need me there, honey,” she told me while she was sorting her pencils.

She was putting them in coffee cans. Red ones in the Folgers can. Yellow ones in the Maxwell House. The broken stubs went into an old jelly jar because she always said a stub still writes. She was so precise, so quiet, like she was trying to shrink herself down to fit into the background of her own life. I finally convinced her to go by telling her I needed the fresh air.

The school hadn’t changed much. The cafeteria still had that distinct, permanent smell of yeast rolls and floor wax, mixed with the damp, woolly scent of winter coats. I watched Mama walk down the hall. She was looking at the walls, her eyes scanning for things that weren’t there anymore. When we got to Room 6, she stopped. They had painted over a mural of handprints she’d helped the kids make back in the nineties.

She reached out and touched the fresh, sterile paint with two fingers. She looked like she was touching a bruise.

“They covered my crooked turkey,” she said.