Cora Lee Teachey

Cora Lee Teachey died in Fayetteville on September 7, 2026. She was eighty-four. Born there on May 29, 1942, she grew up in a house that smelled of starch and coffee, and she learned a needle before she learned a highway. A hem, she said, did not talk back, and it paid when the post season was thin. She made uniforms, hems, and funeral clothes in a front room that smelled of starch. People came with a plastic bag of someone else's measurements and left with a garment that fit the living body, not the hanger. She cooked for her church without putting her name on a committee list. When a family could not pay for alterations, she found a reason the job had been easy. She married Alphonse Teachey in 1963. They raised three children in a bungalow that grew a porch because the first one filled with cousins. Alphonse drove a truck and died in 1999. Cora kept the house, the garden of peppers, and the habit of sending a plate next door when she cooked too much, which was most evenings. She watched the same Saturday choir from a chair long after she stopped standing for every verse. Grandchildren remember a woman who corrected their manners more than their homework, who kept a cigar box of buttons as if it were a bank, and who did not waste a scrap of cloth or a kind word. She died in Fayetteville, in the heat she had always said she preferred to a clean cold. The church kitchen will be louder without her and less sure of the salt.