Don't you dare hide your light

A little golden bird reminds me.

Mrs. Louise Smith was 65 the year I sat in her fourth-grade classroom—her last year of teaching. But if you think she coasted toward retirement, you’ve never met Mrs. Smith. She was tall and quick and ageless in the way that some people are. She taught like someone just getting started, with curiosity, energy, and a spark of mischief in her eyes.

I remember the first time she called on me. I hadn’t raised my hand—I was too shy—but she looked directly at me and said, “Miss Digh, I have a feeling you have something important to say.” She smiled. “Don’t you dare hide your light under a bushel.”

It startled me, how sure she sounded. Like she knew something about me I didn’t yet know. I answered her question—tentatively, then more confidently—and from that moment on, I felt like I mattered in a way I hadn’t before. I made all A’s in her classroom that year. I was proud to make her proud.

That was her magic. She made us feel seen. Not as a group of kids, but as individuals. She knew who needed encouragement and who needed to be challenged. She noticed the quiet ones. She asked questions that opened doors inside us.

“Why do you think the character acted that way?” she’d ask, after reading aloud from one of the many books in her classroom.
“What would you do if you were in her place?”
“I think,” she said once, “that stories are the best way to grow a heart.”

We all wanted to grow hearts as big as hers.

Mrs. Smith didn’t just teach us multiplication tables and sentence structure. She taught us how to think, how to wonder, how to be kind. She celebrated small things—a well-drawn star in the margin of a paper, a thoughtful question, a moment of courage or kindness on the playground. Her laugh was light but full-bodied, and when she laughed, the whole classroom softened. I remember a commotion in the hallway one day, and we all ran to the classroom door to see Mrs. Smith riding a spider bike down the hallways of the school in her dress, laughing. Unheard of! And so like her.

At the end of that school year, on the final day before summer, we learned it was her last day of teaching. We were stunned. She hadn’t said a word all year.

“But why didn’t you tell us?” one of us asked.

She smiled. “Because I didn’t want to waste a single minute saying goodbye when we could be learning something new.”

We clapped for her that day, a ragtag chorus of nine-year-olds, but none of us could have known how much she’d still be teaching us in the years to come.

When I finished fourth grade, she gave me a letter that said she hoped I would never smoke cigarettes and she expected I would see the world.

She and I kept in touch for the rest of her life. That summer, my mother took me to her house so I could give her the first little burlap weaving I ever did as a child. I thought it was beautiful, and she hung it up right after I gave it to her, proof that she loved it.

After that, it was cards and notes, mostly at the holidays. As I grew older, we exchanged letters. Actual letters, in longhand, with stamps and return addresses and the occasional newspaper clipping tucked inside.

Once, we visited her in her retirement community—me, John, and little Emma. When we arrived, she flung open the door before we even knocked.

“Well, it’s about time!” she said, arms open wide. “I’ve been waiting to meet this marvelous child you’ve written so much about.”

Emma stepped behind my leg, shy.

“Oh, no hiding allowed,” Mrs. Smith said gently, crouching to Emma’s eye level. “You look like someone with very important thoughts. Am I right?”

Emma nodded, just barely.

“Good,” she said. “Then we’ll need hats.”

Before I knew what had happened, they were at the kitchen table folding tricorn hats from old newspaper pages. Emma giggled as Mrs. Smith placed hers rakishly on her head and declared, “To the hallway, my dear! Our ship awaits!” Then she picked up a recorder and began to play something vaguely patriotic as they marched up and down the hallway. John and I followed, laughing.

“Emma is going to remember this forever,” I whispered. I knew I would.

Mrs. Smith wrote to me for years, inviting me to join her in the retirement community, starting when I was about 35.

“I told her it might be a while,” I’d joke when another invitation came.

One day, I received a package—inside was a recruitment brochure for her retirement community and a short story I’d written in fourth grade.

“I knew you were a writer even then,” she wrote in the margin. “You had rhythm in your sentences and compassion in your characters. Never stop writing.”

When I wrote my first published essay, I sent her a copy. She called me on the phone.

“Well,” she said, “I hope you’ve framed it. I certainly would have. I’m so proud of you, dear.”

I was nearly 40 at the time, but I melted into that “dear” like I was still nine.

We spoke every now and then in her later years. She was sharp until the very end, still asking questions that made me pause.

“Are you using your voice?” she asked me once.

“I’m trying to,” I said.

“No trying,” she replied. “Just do it. You’ve got a good one.”

She made you feel like there was something important inside you and that it was your responsibility—and your joy—to share it.

I think about her often when I sit down to write. When I feel unsure or small or too tired to speak up, I imagine her beside me, saying, “Don’t you dare hide that light, dear.”

She taught me the basics of the fourth grade, yes. But she also taught me to pay attention, to be kind, to believe in the value of my voice—and in the value of other people’s voices. She taught with her whole self. And long after she left the classroom, she kept teaching by example.

Mrs. Smith didn’t just retire from teaching. She retired to a different kind of teaching: the quiet kind, the handwritten-notes kind, the “this made me think of you” kind. She modeled what it means to stay connected, to keep loving people across time and distance and change.

She died in her 90s, and shortly afterward, I received a small, heavy glass bird, the color of amber, in the mail from her daughter, along with a note that told me Mrs. Smith had saved every postcard I had ever sent her from my travels around the world.

“Mama wanted you to have this,” the note said.

That little bird sits on my desk, reminding me of her lessons and reminding me to write.

Her classroom was where I first felt truly known. Her life was where I learned what it looks like to be truly good.

She was my teacher for one year. She shaped me for a lifetime.

Love,

Patti