The Bakery That Never Closed Its Back Door

For thirty-one years, Rosa Taveras ran a small panaderia on Cypress Avenue in the Bronx. She opened at four in the morning and closed at seven at night, six days a week. On Sundays she rested — but the back door stayed unlocked.

That back door was famous in the neighborhood. If a mother ran short before payday, she could walk through the alley, knock twice, and Rosa would hand her a bag of bread and sweet rolls without writing down a thing. When asked why she never kept accounts, Rosa would say, "El Shaddai keeps the books. I just keep the oven warm."

Rosa never became wealthy by Wall Street standards. But her three children all graduated from college. Her oldest son became a pediatrician who returned to the same neighborhood. Her daughter teaches fourth grade two blocks from the bakery. When Rosa was diagnosed with cancer in 2019, over four hundred families showed up to a fundraiser organized in forty-eight hours by people who remembered that back door.

She died in 2021, but the panaderia still operates under her daughter-in-law's name. The back door is still unlocked on Sundays.

The psalmist writes that the righteous person "has scattered abroad, given to the poor" and that "their righteousness endures forever." Rosa Taveras never read those words as poetry. She read them as a job description — and her children, her neighborhood, and that unlocked door are the enduring proof.