HOPE IS A COUNTRY ROAD

by Shanon Weaver

Long before Ada Simmons learned just how much one determined person could change, her blind grandfather planted a stick.

As a child, Ada once found him behind his house in rural Alabama and asked what he was doing. “I’m planting,” he told her. She looked at the ground. “Papa, that’s a stick.” His answer stayed with her. “It is to you. But it’s a flower to me, and it always will be here. I’m putting it here for a reason, and I’m going to check on it every week.”

Now 80, Ada carries her grandfather’s vision. She learned to recognize possibilities others might miss. That vision took root near the Alabama-Georgia line, where she was fifth of six in a family that made something from whatever it had. Her mother was a seamstress. Her father and aunt pursued teacher certification when their town had no certified teachers. They kept building a future they might never see. “I always heard, ‘I won’t see this, but it’ll be there for you,’” Ada says.

At 17, Ada boarded a bus for college in New Orleans, her first time away from home. There she met her husband, Jim, and found her calling in special education. Her concern for children had started years earlier, when fourth-grade Ada walked a boy with polio and leg braces to school so others would not pick on him.

As a young teacher, Ada brought special-needs students home for weekends, where her children played with them and created activities. She later earned certification to assess special-needs students because she believed teachers and parents—not just administrators and psychologists—deserved a voice in academic decisions.

She was equally unwilling to accept a New Orleans school building that smelled of urine and grew so hot that teachers and students spent afternoons outside. Ada assembled a panel, went on television and argued that the school should be torn down and rebuilt. Then she showed the neighborhood what a welcoming school could feel like.

Using New Orleans’ favorite celebration, Ada helped her sixth-graders stage a Mardi Gras ball in the worn cafeteria. She made a dress for the queen, added music, sandwiches and lemonade, and persuaded one student’s mother to help. Some parents had never visited, yet the building filled. “The parents were ecstatic,” Ada remembers. They agreed to join her at city council. The old school was eventually torn down, and years later Ada visited the new campus. “It was everything anybody would wish it to be.”

Hurricane Katrina forced Ada and Jim away from New Orleans and eventually brought them to McKinney, where she found more work to do. At a crowded red beans and rice dinner for other displaced residents, organizers asked people to name their greatest problems and decide what should happen next. Ada admired the strategy. An organizer corrected her. “You weren’t supposed to like it. You were supposed to just do it. Let’s get to work tomorrow and get all of you in houses.” Then he put her in charge of a meeting.

Working with Dallas Area Interfaith and a local college, Ada helped pursue a program that would give people the credentials they needed for better jobs. The first proposal failed. The group studied other programs, revised its plan and tried again. Skill QUEST passed, offering two-year associate degrees in fields such as pharmacy and nursing technology. Over about a decade, 142 people graduated. Churches supplied tutors, rides and help for families. “Our graduation was always family,” Ada says.

That work reflects her definition of hope. “Hope is a road, a country road,” she says. “There’s never a road at first, but when many people walk, the road comes into existence.” Ada still serves through community organizations, works the polls and advocates for affordable childcare. When people ask why she is never home, she tells them, “Because the work is outside of my house.”

Most mornings, Ada is up by 5:30 watering her plants. Her advice to senior readers is equally down-to-earth. Think about what might make you happy, then find a way to make someone else happy, too. Make a new friend. Say hello. Take a walk, start a conversation or buy someone a cup of coffee. For Ada, the road forward can begin with something as small as hello. “There’s something good to do every day,” she says.

And if enough of us take that advice, we may just make a road where there wasn’t one before.