Eleanor “Nora” Whitcomb

Eleanor Ellison was born in Traverse City, Michigan, in the spring of 1942, the second daughter of Harold and Beatrice Ellison. She was Nora before she was old enough to object to it, and Nora she stayed for eighty-four years.

She met Thomas Whitcomb at a church social she had not wanted to attend. He asked her what she was reading. She told him, at length, and he listened to all of it. They were married fifty-two years, and in all that time she never once had to explain a book to him twice.

She spent thirty-one years as the librarian at Deerpath Middle School. Three decades of eleven-year-olds passed through that room, and she learned all of their names, including the ones who came in only to get out of the cold. She kept a drawer of paperbacks she had bought herself, for the children whose families could not.

She did not believe there was such a thing as a child who didn’t like reading. Only a child who hadn’t been handed the right book yet.

At home she played piano entirely by ear, having quit lessons at nine and never looked back. She wore pearl earrings every day, including to the grocery store. She tucked a sprig of lavender in her coat pocket each fall and forgot about it until the following spring, when the whole closet smelled like her. She made an apple pie that her son-in-law once described, at Thanksgiving, in a toast, as “the reason I proposed” — which was not true, but she let it stand.

In her last years, her family learned to recognize the sentence that meant she had made up her mind about something and was about to fix it. Put the kettle on. We’ll figure it out. She said it about broken engagements, failed classes, a leaking roof, a diagnosis. It was never really about the tea.

She is survived by her children, Margaret Whitcomb Hale and Daniel Whitcomb; her grandchildren Claire, Jonah, Elise, and Peter; her great-granddaughter Rose, who is two and has her hands; and her sister, Vivian Moore. She was preceded in death by her husband, Thomas, and by her parents.