The Sunday Drive

Nancy Ackerman pulled out of the church lot at eleven-oh-eight, tucked a bulletin into the console beside a small unopened package of butterscotch discs, and turned the Buick left onto Walnut.

Nancy Wickham Ackerman — Holmes County High '69, Ohio Wesleyan '73 (elementary education, with a minor in reading pedagogy under a professor named Adele Newcomb whose thank-you card is still pressed inside the front of Nancy's 1949 edition of The Little House on the second shelf of the built-in in the front room), reading specialist at Millersburg Elementary School on North Washington Street from the September of 1974 until her retirement on the last Friday of May, 2016 — has driven the same small loop through her town on Sunday mornings after the nine-thirty service since the second Sunday after the March morning in 2020 that her husband Dale sat down at the kitchen table with the county paper, said goodness, Nan, I'm dizzy, and did not stand up again.

The loop is thirty-eight minutes if she catches the light at Clay and 62, forty-one if she does not.

She does not think about it as a loop. She thinks about it as her drive, the way her mother, in the June of 1961, thought about her Sunday afternoon visit to Aunt Meredith on the porch on Adams Street with the two glasses of iced tea and the paper fan from the Loudonville funeral home. It is the shape of a small ritual, and the shape is the point.

At the corner of Walnut and Clay, waiting for the light, she thinks about the Holmes County Historical Society. Not by that name. She thinks about the barn. The 1876 barn on the north edge of town whose sagging north wall the Society finally got the estimate for in the April, and whose grant application she read twice at her kitchen table in the May, and to which she has decided, without deciding, that she will send a hundred dollars in the September when the certificate of deposit at Killbuck Savings comes due.

She does not think about segment four sustaining. She does not think about quarterly appeal. She thinks about the barn, and about the December afternoon in 1979 she took her second-grade class in yellow buses to see the Christmas at the Farmstead exhibit, and about the smell of the hay and the varnish and the small cinnamon donuts the docent Mrs. Hostetler had made in her own kitchen and brought in a Tupperware carrier.

The light turns. The Buick moves.

Nine places, eleven organizations

The drive has, in the way small rituals accrete their meaning over five years, come to have nine places on it.

At the DeWitts' — the small yellow bungalow with the wraparound porch at 214 Walnut, where Marge DeWitt (a Girl Scout leader from 1978 to 1996 with Nancy's own daughter Ellen in Troop 314) has lived alone since the January of 2023 — Nancy thinks about the Millersburg branch of Girl Scouts of Ohio's Heartland Council, and about the small blue Investiture patch Marge sewed on Ellen's sash in the church basement one Tuesday evening in the November of 1980.

At the corner of 62 and Clay, past the small red-brick Odd Fellows Hall whose lodge disbanded in 2011 and whose building the Salvation Army now uses as a food-pantry annex, Nancy thinks about the food pantry, and about the eleven Saturday mornings she and Dale spent unloading the truck from the Akron-Canton Regional Foodbank in the autumn of 2014.

On the small rise on 62 north of town, where the road bends past the Amish farm belonging to Melvin and Emma Yoder — whose son Aaron was in Nancy's first-grade reading group in the September of 1996 with the small speech impediment that Nancy spent forty-five minutes a week for two years quietly untangling — Nancy thinks about the Holmes County Education Foundation, whose Aaron Yoder Reading Room on the second floor of the small county library on North Washington Street opened in the June of 2019 when Aaron, now a middle-school principal in Dover, wrote the ten-thousand-dollar naming check himself.

At the Nature Conservancy easement sign on the pull-off south of the covered bridge over Doughty Creek — the fifty-eight-acre easement Dale, in his quiet fifteen years on the local land trust board, had helped assemble parcel by parcel from six neighbors between the summer of 2001 and the fall of 2016 — Nancy pulls the Buick over. She does this every Sunday. She sits for four minutes with the engine off and the window cracked. She thinks about the trust. She thinks about Dale. She has not, in five and a half years, told anyone at the trust that she does this. The trust does not know.

Past the old lumberyard, past the elementary school, past the small blue house on Adams where Nancy's grandmother lived from the March of 1954 until the November of 1983, past the Amish quilt shop on North Washington, past the Grace Brethren church where Nancy's sister-in-law Helen plays organ on Sundays, past the parking lot of the funeral home on South Monroe where two of Nancy's four college roommates were laid out in the September and October of last year — the Buick, at the end of the loop, turns left onto Adams and pulls into the small crushed-limestone drive at 402, and Nancy sits for a moment with the engine ticking and the Sunday quiet of the town holding still around her.

Eleven organizations.

She has thought about eleven organizations, in thirty-eight minutes, without knowing that she has done it.

What the development file says

Two hours east and slightly north, in a converted brick woolen mill on the west bank of a small river in a county-seat town in the Western Reserve, the development office of one of the eleven — a mid-sized statewide conservation nonprofit that Dale gave to for thirty-one years and that Nancy has continued to give to since — has, on the second Monday of every quarter, a portfolio review meeting.

Nancy Ackerman comes up on the third page of the sustaining-donor report.

The line reads Ackerman, Nancy W. — Millersburg, OH — $85/yr since 2011 — mail only — no engagement noted — do not upgrade.

The director of individual giving, a thoughtful thirty-four-year-old named Priya who has been at the organization for eighteen months and who cares about her work with a seriousness that has kept her at her desk until nine on a Thursday twice this month, is not, on the second Monday in July, planning to call Nancy Ackerman.

She is planning to call the forty-two people in the upgrade candidate segment whose wealth screens returned high capacity — $250K+ investable assets in the June refresh.

Nancy Ackerman's wealth screen returned middle-band — a small paid-off house on a librarian's pension, a modest IRA, a certificate of deposit at Killbuck Savings, a 2004 Buick Century, and the fifty-eight-acre Doughty Creek easement she now, since Dale's death, quietly holds the residual interest in, which the wealth screen does not know about and which no data vendor in the state of Ohio will ever surface without her telling them.

The wealth screen has not ridden in the Buick.

The wealth screen has not sat, engine off, at the pull-off south of the covered bridge for four minutes on a Sunday morning in July.

The wealth screen does not know about the barn.

What twenty years of software has quietly missed

For twenty years, every honest development office in America has been buying — one contract at a time, at prices that would build the north wall of the Historical Society's barn twice a year — tools that were designed to answer a question Nancy Ackerman is not asking.

The tools were built to answer: of our two hundred and forty thousand records, which ones look most like the ones who gave the most last year?

Nancy is asking a different question. She has been asking it, quietly, for thirty-eight minutes every Sunday morning for five and a half years, without noticing that she is asking it, from the driver's seat of a green Buick with a bulletin in the console.

Her question is: of the eleven small hopes I hold for this town, which one this month is the one I can, in a small careful way, hold up?

That is a different question. It requires a different instrument. It cannot be answered by the look like the ones who gave the most last year engine, because Nancy does not, by that engine's reckoning, look like anyone worth calling.

The instrument that could answer Nancy's question is a small careful set of notes, assembled by someone who has spent a quiet Wednesday morning listening — to Nancy's church bulletin, to the Millersburg Holmes County Hub-Ranger, to Dale's fifteen-year board minutes at the land trust, to the Aaron Yoder Reading Room dedication brochure from the June of 2019, to the small unpaid docent shift Nancy still takes at the Historical Society barn on the second Saturday of every month April through October — and set them beside Nancy's file, and hand them to Priya on a Monday morning at eight-fifty, before the second-quarter portfolio meeting.

The notes would say:

Ackerman, Nancy W. Retired reading specialist, Millersburg Elementary, 1974–2016. Widow of Dale, March 2020. Dale sat fifteen years on the local land trust board and helped assemble the fifty-eight-acre Doughty Creek easement, in which Nancy now holds the residual interest — a fact her wealth screen will not surface, but which the trust's own board minutes for the September of 2018 record on page four. She has driven the same thirty-eight-minute loop through Millersburg after church every Sunday since Dale's memorial. The loop passes the easement pull-off, where she sits with the engine off for four minutes. Suggestion, this month: no ask. A letter, hand-signed, from the executive director, thanking her for Dale — by name — for the Doughty Creek work, and enclosing a print of the small pen-and-ink of the covered bridge the trust commissioned for its 1998 annual report. Mail it from a small town, not the office. Nancy will keep it in the top drawer of the built-in in the front room, beside her mother's thank-you card from Adele Newcomb.

Priya, on a Monday morning at eight-fifty, reads the notes. She looks at them for a long moment.

She writes the letter herself, at the small oak desk under the west window in her apartment on Saturday morning, so the postmark reads a small town and not the office.

That is the whole product.

We are not the drive

Rōmy is not, and cannot be, the drive.

The drive is Nancy's. The four minutes at the pull-off are Nancy's. The barn is Nancy's. The small quiet ritual of turning left out of the church lot at eleven-oh-eight on a Sunday morning in the last week of July is Nancy's — and it is the whole gift, and the whole reason the gift will still be there in the September when the certificate of deposit at Killbuck Savings comes due.

What a tool can do — quietly, in a converted mill in the Western Reserve on a Monday morning at eight-fifty, twenty minutes before Priya opens the CRM — is hand her the small careful page a good listener would have written if a good listener had been sitting on the small stone wall behind the elementary school on Walnut, watching the green Buick pass.

That is a smaller job than the industry has been trying to sell for twenty years.

It is also, we think, with some love, the whole job.

A small assignment, with love

Take a Sunday this month, if you can. Not the trendy kind of Sunday — the small one, the one you spend in the town you actually live in, without a plan.

After church, or after the coffee, or after the small quiet forty-five minutes you spend on the porch with the county paper — get in the car.

Do not turn on the radio.

Drive a small loop through your town, without deciding in advance which way you will turn at the second stop sign.

At the nine places you find yourself thinking about — the school your children went to, the bench with the small brass plaque, the corner where the food pantry runs on Saturdays, the small red-brick building whose second-story window still has, at Christmas, the electric candle your mother put in her window in the December of 1978 — pull the car over for a moment.

Think about the small hope that place holds for you.

Then, on Monday morning, at the small oak desk under whichever window in your house is the one you write your quiet things at — pull down a plain notecard from the top drawer, and write, in your own hand, the two sentences you would want your best listener to have written for you, if your best listener had been in the passenger seat.

Sign it.

Mail it from your kitchen table on Saturday morning, so the postmark reads the town you actually live in.

The Buick is still in the drive at 402 Adams.

The bulletin is still in the console.

Nancy has been keeping the loop warm since a Sunday in the March of 2020. ♡