ENFIELD — The cards and the cyber-messages started flooding Paul Mirski’s analog and digital mailboxes within hours of his wife Kaye’s obituary appearing in the newspaper earlier this month.
And among the tsunami of sympathy and memories and prayers — from Kaye’s former students from Enfield Village School (EVS), from her ex-colleagues in education, and from her fellow horse enthusiasts and devoted Catholics — Paul Mirski couldn’t help smiling in particular one from former Enfield residents Deb and Wayne Adams, with whom Kaye worshipped at St. Helena Church and prayed at the LaSalette Shrine for many years.
“She was small in stature but a real spitfire,” Deb Adams wrote in elegant cursive. “I so enjoyed hearing her when she would get animated about a particular issue!”
So, most days, did Paul Mirski, from his courtship of Karen Rose Albert in the early 1960s — the only woman he ever dated — through their 53 years of marriage, until she died in Florida in April, at age 76.
“She was feisty,” Mirski, a former Republican state representative, recalled in mid-June. “She did not suffer fools.
“But she was mostly nice about it.”
Just ask one of the hundreds of kids who passed through her third- and fourth-grade classrooms at Enfield Village School between 1970 and 2002.
“On the one hand, she held very good control of her classroom,” said Enfield resident Kate Plumley Stewart, a 1998 graduate of Mascoma Valley Regional High School. “Older students told us that Mrs. Mirski flew her broom backwards, and we told the kids behind us the same thing.
“But she also did things like let me bring my parakeet Pete to school, taught him to whistle ‘pretty bird,’ and comforted us by having a funeral for him after he hit his head on the food dish.”
Between those unofficial teachable moments, the Michigan-born Mirski also used her imagination — and the theatrical skills that she learned while attending the University of Detroit — to teach the basics to students across the spectrum of ability.
“In third grade, you’re starting to work more on math skills, especially multiplication and division,” said Plumley Stewart, a former member of the Mascoma school district board. “She came up with a game where she held up a flash card and it had a problem on it. We’d stand in line, and she’d call on two people at a time to answer. It got you up and got you moving, using other parts of your brain. She was very good at involving different kinds of learners. She was very good with the learners who couldn’t just sit there.”
So her colleagues noticed.
“She especially liked working with the more difficult students,” Enfield resident and former EVS fourth-grade teacher Francine Lozeau said recently. “She had such a natural way with them. Oftentimes she would scout them out in the second-grade classes, noticing the ones who learned differently or at a different pace, and she’d say to the principal, ‘Put that kid in my class next year.’ ”
At whatever level kids learned, “she just held them spellbound,” Lozeau added.
“She was the best storyteller ever. She could take a plain, old lesson and she would convince her class it was going to be something spectacular. When my two kids had her, they would come home, and they were so excited about the way she taught something you’d think was routine. The first-grade teachers used to ask her to read John Stadler’s children’s book The Adventures of Snail at School. She had an adorable snail voice that just had everybody in stitches. It was just so funny.
“She could make anybody laugh.”
Kaye Mirski could also drive a hard bargain on behalf of her colleagues, during the years she negotiated teacher and salaries and benefits on behalf of the Mascoma Valley Regional Education Association.
“She knew the contract backwards and forwards,” Lozeau said. “She was a champion of teacher rights.”
And away from the negotiating table, Mirski was a teacher whisperer.
“She really included me in the school from the time I got there,” recalled Frank Gould, who taught third-graders in an adjoining classroom. “I came in with three years of experience in Virginia, and she really helped me do the right things by the kids, and helped me meet expectations from the school that I wasn’t aware of or not able to do. If I had a difficult time, I would go in and talk with her.”
Mirski remained a mentor and a friend despite the relatively liberal outlook that Gould would later take into his three terms as a Democrat representing Lebanon in the New Hampshire House.
“She was pretty conservative as far as New Hampshire politics were concerned, but she and I had a good relationship as far as teaching was concerned,” Gould said. “I really appreciated her.
“There were several times where she brought me back down to Earth again.”
Her colleagues and other friends figure that Mirski would have continued serving her student and faculty constituencies well beyond 2002, but for the onset of the leukemia that she would spend her last 17 years fighting. Almost as disappointing as retirement itself, she was too weak and fragile, at first, to spend that free time exercising her other passion outside of her family: riding horses.
“We had been planning a summer trip to Ireland, where we’d be riding every day,” fellow Enfield resident and Woodland Riding and Driving Club member Leigh Davis said. “A trip like this was a dream we had for a long time, and she was so determined that we went anyway, and the castle where we were staying arranged to bring her to every point where we were going. One day we even did a horse-drawn carriage ride so that she could go.”
After returning to the Upper Valley, Mirski worked her way back into the saddle on Ebony, the Morgan on whom she’d competed in dressage, through the High Horses therapeutic riding program.
“She brought in some adaptive equipment, and someone built a mounting ramp for her to get up and into the saddle,” said former High Horses program manager and instructor Mary Gerakaris, of Canaan, said. “The first time she was able to do it and go around the ring, we were both crying. It was absolute tears of joy.
“It was a wonderful transition for her.”
The transition gradually evolved into a cycle of riding, praying at LaSalette, getting together with school and riding friends and spending summers at a camp on Crystal Lake with Kaye’s four grandchildren and with her son Christian and her daughter Sara, and winters in Florida with Paul.
“When we were in the Upper Valley, there were a lot of people who would came over to help her with Ebony,” Paul Mirski said. “For years, some of the people she’d taught or knew some other way would come by and help her with haying.”
While she stopped riding a few years ago, and Gerakaris arranged for the aging Ebony to be euthanized, Kaye stayed in touch with her friends in the Upper and Mascoma valleys.
“We had a lot of laughs together,” Gerakaris said. “Laughter is one of the most important things in life, and she realized that.”
Outside of the family, few of the people with whom she shared those laughs knew that she wouldn’t be coming back from Florida this spring.
“Before Kaye left in the fall, I was diagnosed with cancer, and was pretty shaken, and sent emails out to my friends,” Lozeau recalled. “When she wrote to me, there was no indication that she was particularly sick again. I kept her posted after she left for Florida, and she was writing back to me, telling me this wonderful stuff. She was praying for me, encouraging me, giving me hope.
“She never said anything about herself, like ‘Pray for me.’ ”
David Corriveau can be reached at dcorriveau@vnews.com and at 603-727-3304.