The Coats She Left Behind

When Miss Rosa Lee Patterson died in 2019, the members of her small church in Albany, Georgia, expected a modest funeral. Rosa had never held a title or led a committee. She worked thirty-one years at a dry cleaner on Oglethorpe Boulevard, and what most people didn't know was that every winter she quietly took home coats that customers never picked up, mended them by hand at her kitchen table, and drove them to the women's shelter on Pine Avenue.…