Imogene Fay Laster

Imogene Fay Laster died in Clarksville on September 3, 2026. She was seventy-seven. Born there on December 12, 1948, she grew up knowing tobacco as a rumor that paid and a school bell as a set of honest problems. She learned a steam table before she learned a highway. A tray, she said, is a kind of sentence: it has to arrive complete. She spent twenty-four years feeding children in a brick elementary that did not look like the brochures. She started washing pans. She ended running a breakfast that had to catch kids who came in late from a pickup that had already been working since dark. She kept extra milk without making a speech about it. When a storm closed the buses she still opened the kitchen, because weather is not an excuse to skip a meal. She married Rafael Laster in 1970. They raised a daughter and a son in a bungalow with a pecan that dropped more work than shade. Rafael drove a delivery van. Imogene packed lunches that could survive humidity. After he died in 2014 she kept his chair for a year and then gave it to a grandson who needed a place to do homework. Neighbors remember a woman who brought tamales to a night shift without staying for thanks, who knew which intern needed a second explanation, and who could hear a rice pot without looking. She loved a late-summer tomato, a clean map of the lunch count, and the particular quiet after the last tray. She died in Clarksville, in the heat she had always preferred to a clean cold. The line is still moving. Someone else will count the milk.