My Daughter Wrote Her Teacher a Letter Asking Her to Marry Me. The Teacher Showed Up at Our Cherry Farm With Her Answer

My name is Nate Hollis. I’m 44, and I grow tart cherries on a hundred and sixty acres outside Traverse City, Michigan.

My wife, Kristen, died three years ago. A car accident on an icy road in January, coming home from her shift at the hospital.

I have a fourteen-year-old daughter named Ellie, who has her mother’s freckles, her mother’s stubbornness and absolutely no filter.

After Kristen died, Ellie and I held each other together. Cereal for dinner. Laundry nobody folded. Long, quiet drives to the lake.

The life insurance policy Kristen had through work paid off the farm’s mortgage. It let me keep the farm and set money aside for Ellie in a 529 college savings plan. Kristen had set that up when Ellie was born. She thought of everything.

Except how I was supposed to live without her.

Ellie says I’m “objectively good-looking for a dad” and that “half the moms at school ask about you.” I tell her that’s not true. She rolls her eyes so hard I worry about her.

Last fall, Ellie came home from school with a strange look on her face.

“Dad,” she said, “don’t be mad.”

“What did you do?”

“Nothing,” she said. “I mean, something. I mean, Ms. Lane might come over.”

“Who’s Ms. Lane?”

“My English teacher.” Ellie looked at the floor. “I wrote her a letter. About you.”

“What kind of letter?”

She mumbled something.

“Ellie.”

“A letter asking her if she’d consider marrying you,” my daughter said.