Rosalie at 109 years young still in rosy health
SHE SITS propped up in an one-seater armchair in the common room of Highlands House, Vredehoek, Cape Town, which she’s called home for seven years.
Rosalie Wolpe, though frail, still has a vivid memory and without hesitation confirms she is turning 109 today.
She has outlived most of her family and is now left with her two children David Wolpe, 73, and daughter Janet Dickman, 79, five grandchildren and six great-grandchildren.
Wolpe, originally from Joburg, moved to Cape Town as a little girl and though she has no real recollection of her younger days, remembers meeting her husband, Morris, on Table Mountain.
She giggles when asked about him. How did you meet Morris? “We were on the mountain,” she says.
Was he a handsome young man? “Of course not, oh no, not at all,” she laughs.
“You don’t marry a person because they are handsome, but he was definitely not handsome,” she says.
Was he a good man? “I suppose,” she laughs. Every wrinkle and every contour line bears a story. Her neck pains interrupt her from time to time but she pushes on.
She recalls a time in the 1950s and 1960s when she owned a grocery store in Claremont, where she also lived.
Two men worked in the store, delivering groceries on bicycles to customers who phoned in with their orders.
Entrepreneurship and business acumen had always run in her family – 20 years earlier her mother ran a boarding house, the Chambers de Luxe, in Longmarket Street, which is today The Tudor Inn.
For the past seven years, Wolpe has made a comfortable home for herself at Highlands House. Staff at the retirement home describe her as a “darling”.
“She chooses her own outfits in the morning, she always wants to look pretty,” said her carer, Julia Mentile.
“She is not too talkative but she smiles a lot, and when she walks into the dining hall, she waves at everyone as if she is the queen of England.”
Wolpe attributes her long life to healthy living: “I’ve never been sick, never went to the doctor and have never been hospitalised. I used to walk everywhere,” she says.
Now, at 109, all Wolpe suffers from is a sprained neck and a bit of fatigue.
asanda.sokanyile@inl.co.za