Ruth Waldron

Ruth Waldron is a former Benedictine nun and physical-education teacher whose home becomes a refuge for Ellie Chavez and her children, Delia Cachora Ortiz and Eddie. What begins as a place to wait out a storm becomes the children’s home for four years; Ruth’s care and tutoring give Delia both a surrogate parent and a way to thrive at school. Her enduring partnership with Ellie, maintained despite the pressures surrounding their lives, gives her role a significance beyond hospitality: she helps make a family across a period when that family faced legal and professional vulnerability.

Identity and First Welcome

Ruth is introduced as a tall, bony woman who comes out onto the porch of her small frame house late at night. Ellie and the children have reached Tempe after a long journey: their car took time to start, and summer rain made the washes between Quijotoa and Casa Grande impassable. Eddie is asleep in the car, while Delia stands on the edge of the porch, poised to flee. Ruth greets Ellie, then bends down to meet Delia at her own level and welcomes her by name. The supper waiting inside, and the food scents drifting from the house, make the arrival feel like an offer of safety as well as shelter.

Ellie had intended to stay only one night with Ruth, a friend of Sister Justine. The next day, however, she did not go looking for an apartment. She and the children remained with Ruth for the four years that Ellie was enrolled in the undergraduate program at ASU. The change from temporary guest to household member establishes Ruth not through a single act of rescue, but through the sustained work of making room for a family.

Care and Delia’s Education

While Ellie studied, Ruth worked as a physical-education teacher at two elementary schools in Tempe and took on much of the children’s everyday care. She took Delia and Eddie to ball games, the zoo, and the Arizona State Fair, helped them with homework, and attended parent-teacher association meetings when Ellie could not. These practical acts make her a surrogate mother in the fullest daily sense: she is present both in the children’s recreation and in the unglamorous routines that support their schooling.

Delia initially struggled in class. She was well behind the other children, placed with slower students, and largely ignored. With her own abilities and Ruth’s nightly tutoring at home, she rose to the top of her class. Ruth’s contribution is therefore tied to a distinct change in Delia’s circumstances: the girl who had been overlooked gained the instruction and attention that allowed her to excel. The narrative sets Ruth’s consistent investment in Delia against the insecurity that would later surround the children’s family arrangements.

Partnership with Ellie and Family Pressures

Delia did not understand the nature of Ellie and Ruth’s relationship as a child. In high school, she came to understand that the two women had been lovers almost from the beginning, from the night Ruth welcomed the family into her home. Both were exiles in different senses: Ellie had left the reservation, while Ruth had left her convent and faced the disapproval of her family. The house that first sheltered Ellie and her children thus also became the setting for a lasting partnership.

Years later, in law school, Delia understood more fully the pressures surrounding her father Manuel Chavez’s demand for Eddie. Lesbian mothers had no rights in those days. If Ellie had refused to give Eddie up, she risked losing both children; a legal dispute could also have cost her a postgraduate fellowship, while public scandal could have damaged Ruth’s career in the Tempe public schools. These were the constraints around the family’s separation, not evidence that Ruth’s bond with Ellie or the children had ended. Ruth’s care had become part of a household shaped by choices made under unequal legal and social conditions.

Later Life and Significance

Ellie and Ruth remained together for decades. During summer vacations, Ruth would stay with Ellie and Delia wherever they were. After Ruth retired, the couple lived comfortably in a small house Ruth had inherited just outside Cambridge, Massachusetts. Ellie went on to earn a Ph.D. in education and serve for many years with the Bureau of Indian Affairs, becoming a sought-after consultant in American Indian education; despite that career, she never returned to Sells after leaving on the rainy August day when the family first arrived at Ruth’s house.

Ruth’s arc is defined less by a dramatic change than by the durable consequences of her welcome. The overnight refuge becomes a four-year home; tutoring helps an overlooked child excel; and the relationship formed in that house endures into retirement. Her place in Delia’s recollection also reframes the childhood separation from Manuel Chavez: the family’s history is not only one of loss and constraint, but also one of the care Ellie and Ruth built and sustained together.