Margaret Ann Sorensen

Margaret Ann Sorensen, known to nearly everyone as Marge, was born Margaret Ann Halvorsen on May 19, 1953, on a corn and soybean farm outside Story City, Iowa, the third of five children in a Danish Lutheran family that measured a good year in full jars in the cellar and full pews on Sunday. She grew up in barn chores before sunrise, hot-dish suppers after dark, and hymns sung around an upright piano, and she carried the twin gifts of feeding people and making music for the rest of her life.

She was confirmed at St. Petri Lutheran Church at twelve and never really left that sanctuary. She learned the organ as a teenager and would go on to play it, and lead the choir loft, for decades. In 1971 she graduated from the local high school, and the next summer she took a little apartment in town and a job of her own, proud and a bit terrified to be on her own. At a church social in 1974 she met Harold Sorensen, a steady young farmer with mud on his boots and a slow, kind grin, and they married that June in the same church where she had been confirmed.

Together Marge and Harold raised three children, David, Linda, and Karen, on the family farm, where the porch light stayed on and the kitchen door was never really locked. For more than thirty years Marge was the lunch lady at the Roland-Story school, where the children simply called her Miss Marge. She knew every child's name. She slipped an extra roll to the ones whose lunch cards ran short and never once let them feel it was charity. A whole generation of Story County grew up fed by her hands.

Everybody has a Marge story, and most of them happen around a table or in a church basement. Her lattice-top pies took ribbons at the Story County Fair year after year. Her Sunday dinners fed twenty without warning. She kept a garden of tomatoes, sweet corn, and rhubarb, pieced quilts from old dress scraps for every new baby in the congregation, poured coffee for the grieving, and wrote the names of everyone she prayed for in the margins of her hymnal until the pages ran out of room.

She became Grandma in 2001 and gathered five grandchildren and, at last, a great-grandbaby into her arms. She lost her Harold in 2016 and kept going the way she always had, with a warm oven and an open door. Marge passed peacefully at home on January 15, 2025, with her children near, a hymn playing low, and a pie cooling on the counter. There was always a place for you at her table, and there always will be in the memory of her.