You
🕛 12:0012:00Arrive by noon
Coats off, phones on silent, find a seat. The garden gate shuts at 12:20.
From the biscuit tin
Eighty years, five pages
Isa found these in a shortbread tin last spring. Tap a year, or slide the line of washing sideways.
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Six weeks old, in a borrowed gown 1946A very small Rosa
Born at the Port Alder cottage hospital in a November gale, the third of five. Her mother said she arrived laughing, and nobody has ever proved otherwise.
📍 Port Alder
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The whole family, squeezed in 1968The lace-curtain dress
She married Tomas on a rainy Saturday in a dress she sewed from her mother's curtains. They danced in the registry office car park because the hall had flooded.
💕 Registry office, Port Alder
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Soup first, knitting second 1981Rosa's Table opens
Six stools, one soup of the day, one price, no menu. She ran the lunch counter behind the old post office for thirty-one years and taught half the street to knit between orders.
🍲 Orchard Walk
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Sunday, again 1999The table gets longer
Isa arrives in 1999, then Mateo (2002), Noor (2006) and, last of all, Kit (2011). Sunday lunch for fourteen becomes the law of the family, and nobody is excused.
👥 Her kitchen table
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Her favourite thing, ever 2026Eighty, and first to hug
Still the first to hug and the last to leave, still calling everyone "my heart". She says she's only seventy-nineteen. We're taking her word for it, and feeding her anyway.
❤️ Sunday 22 November
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