Surprise visitors are not always welcome, but once in a while they turn out to be an unexpected delight.

On a fine September afternoon in 2019, a woman came to the door of our house. “I’m sorry to bother you,” she said, “but my mother lived in this house for almost fifty years, and she’s turning 100 in two days … would it be okay for her to come and briefly visit?”

It certainly would! We knew Millie Robertson by reputation: our long-time neighbors had known her, some of them having grown up with her kids; and we knew she was the person who’d laid out the very challenging sloped garden we inherited. But we never expected to meet her.

Millie duly walked in together with her daughter Sandy and her grandson and his wife. She apologized for the intrusion (“I just wanted to see the old place”), but we insisted they stay for lunch.

We talked for two or three hours about the Manzanita neighborhood and how it had changed over the decades, and she pointed out various features of the house that she and her husband Russ had extensively modified from its original incarnation as a cabin built in 1900. It turns out our lamp and kitchen cabinets — all done in stained glass — were Millie’s creations. She and her husband bought the house as a summer place in the 1950s, and eventually lived there year-round.

At the end of the very convivial lunch, she said “You must come to my 100th birthday party!” Of course we did. I mean, how often do you get to go to an event like that?

What a life Millie had. She was born in September 1919, in Mud Bay near Olympia. She arrived in the world at home: Her mother gave birth to her in the same bed that had seen the birth of her cousin a month before. For some time, four generations of the family lived on a sheep ranch, where the only electronic entertainment was a radio. “There were guns,” Millie recalled, “but they were for hunting. No one worried about being shot on the way from school or work.”

At the age of ten she contracted polio, and lived in terrible pain. She underwent surgery, but credits her mother for the fact that she didn’t become crippled. “She put hot water bottles on my legs to ease the pain,” she said. “She’d go from door to door collecting hot water bottles from neighbors.”

Apparently it was the best thing she could have done. Millie remained active her entire life; she played golf until the age of 93.

At the age of 18 she married her first husband, and had two children. Then she married Russ, and had another four (five of the six are still alive, the eldest being 86). Her daughter Sandy remembers her as “a hard-working mother who gave us six siblings a good life.”

Although she was increasingly frail in recent years, her mind remained sharp up until her death on the morning of June 8 this year. Millie passed peacefully in Shelton, Washington, and it was typical of her generosity of spirit that she donated her body to the University of Washington Medical School for research.

At her 100th birthday party, in 2019, Millie rubbed a lucky silver elephant pendant and wished for five more years of life. She died three months shy of her 106th birthday, in keeping with that wish — and with a rather more practical matter that she’d shared with us on the day she visited.

“I have a financial advisor,” she said with a laugh. “He says I’m good to 105.”

Donations in memory of Millie Robertson can be made to the Homeward Pet Adoption Center. Visit homewardpet.org/donate.

Phil Clapham is a writer, photographer and retired whale biologist who lives on Maury Island.

Phil Clapham