Leafy sprig tattoo on a forearm

I nearly didn't come on Saturday. The hall at Westfield still smells of floor polish and boiled cabbage, and the lad on the sign-in table had my name spelled wrong on the badge, which I suppose is fitting. Mr Pryce was there, older than God and twice as deaf, still hunting for the cheese he left in the staff room in 1987.

You'll want to know about the herb bed. They've put it under the new car park. I walked out to the spot where we dug up Mrs Dunn's sage that October, the one we swore she'd planted for Lent, and there was nothing but tarmac and a painted bay marked disabled. I stood there longer than was polite. Then Dennis Hale came up beside me, gone soft round the middle, and said, "Salvia officinalis, third row by the bins," as if he'd been carrying it around all these years.

We stood among the parked cars while he told me how the grey leaves feel like chamois if you rub them, how you can hold one against your lip and taste the dust and rain of a summer that was ours. I told him I still keep a pressed sprig in my recipe book. He laughed and said he'd never once opened a cookbook, and I believed him.

I'm sending a photograph of the leaves I took on my phone, though it hardly does the silver underside justice. Write back and tell me what you remember. Tell me what we buried under that sage the night Mrs Dunn came out in her dressing gown, because I've decided I'll never say.

Love, Carol