SOUTH STRAFFORD — On Memorial Day last month, more than two dozen people gathered at the corner of Route 132 and Justin Morrill Highway in South Strafford holding up signs to passing traffic.

“Be Strong, Be Safe, Make Peace,” “Love Your Mother Earth” and “You Look Smashing, Darling,” said the signs people held while standing behind a sign attached to a standing board that announced, “I WISH YOU a PEACEFUL and SAFE WEEK.”

The group came together at the corner that bright Monday morning to honor the life of Roz Finn, a South Strafford resident who had died six days earlier on May 20 at age 84. Every Monday morning, Finn had walked to the same corner, where she held up her sign with her wish expressed in bold, capital letters, waving and smiling at passersby.

“Many of us were moved when we saw her out there holding the sign,” said Therese Linehan, a South Strafford resident and close friend of Finn. “Peace was a big wish for Roz, I think at least in part because she lived through the bombing in England during World War II.”

Linehan described Finn’s Monday morning ritual — standing at the corner by 7 a.m., reg ardless of season or weather. Finn was fine being seen by some people as “the batty old lady” w ho was engaged in a “protest that wasn’t protesting anything,” Linehan said. “She was wishing you something good.”

Under war’s shadow

Born in England exactly two months before the day Germany invaded Poland to ignite World War II, Roz — short for Rosalind — witnessed the London Blitz. She saw the wounded queue up outside her physician grandfather’s medical office for treatment.

The youngest of three girls whose father worked in the insurance business, Finn was sent into the countryside — as many children were — for safety.

But the memories of V2 rockets exploding haunted her so much that she could never abide by the way the adopted country she loved celebrates its birthday every year.

“One of the things that Roz couldn’t stand was 4th of July celebrations because of all the fireworks going off, it would really upset her,” said Doug Erhard, a South Strafford friend who shuttled Finn to her volunteer jobs when, in the last years of her life, she no longer felt safe driving herself.

Finn’s path to South Stafford, where she moved at age 44 in 1983, was circuitous, following, she wrote in her memoir, a “peripatetic” life that began in England, led her to Paris and then to Kenya, where she lived for 15 years.

She married Ian Leslie and they had two children, Melanie, a writer in Lyndon, Vt., and Hugh, who now teaches law in Australia.

A second marriage to Jim Finn, an American business executive stationed in Kenya, was “deeply happy,” family attest. Her children also adopted the Finn surname.

In 1976, Jim Finn returned to his company’s New York City headquarters. The Finns, joined by Jim’s youngest son from a prior marriage, arrived in America on July 1, 1976 — Roz and Jim also coincidentally shared a July 1 birthday. They settled in Connecticut.

That same bicentennial summer newly-met friends invited Roz and Jim to their place in South Strafford. Roz later wrote that seeing Vermont for the first time felt like the same love-at-first-sight thunderclap that struck them when she and Jim first met.

“I fell totally in love,” she wrote of the state and the village, whose landscape echoed the Kent countryside where she grew up.

On a subsequent visit, Finn caught sight on a hillside of a “white farmhouse, cuddled by several red barns.”

Acting on rumors that the 100-acre farm, named Maple Avenue Farm, might be for sale, she reached out to the owners, Gordon and May Cadwgan, who confirmed the rumor was true.

When Jim, who was 17 years older than Roz, retired in 1983, they moved to the place where “I finally found home,” she wrote in her memoir.

’Menagerie of animals’

Without any prior farming experience, the Finns plunged into raising Scottish Blackface sheep, inspired by the sheep Finn remembered seeing in Britain’s countryside.

The leap wasn’t a surprise to people who knew Finn.

“She was a country girl,” said Mary Divet, whose friendship with Finn lasted more than half a century, beginning when they both lived in Kenya.

“She loved getting up in the middle of the night and helping the lambs being born, shearing their wool,” said Divet, who now lives in Connecticut. Finn even gamely embraced disagreeable tasks like deworming the flock.

Although she had attended boarding school as a teenager in London and had a “proper” English upbringing, Finn was cool in situations that would cause others to petrify, Divet said.

Once they went together on an “early morning safari” in Kenya, Divet recounted. Their four-wheel drive Toyota got stuck in a ditch and Finn hopped out to give the vehicle a push.

Divet turned her head and was jolted by what she saw.

“There’s was this lion now sitting on the hill, literally looking straight at us. Roz says, ‘Mary, get out and push.’ And I said, ‘I’m not getting out and pushing with this lion here.’ ” Divet replied.

“But that was how she was. Roz was a force of nature,” Divet said.

Creatures of all kinds, regardless the species (with the possible exceptions of chickens), engendered fierce love and loyalty in Finn, whose South Strafford farm became a “menagerie of animals,” said her daughter, Melanie.

Horses, ducks, cats, a black llama named Lloyd, a honey bee apiary and an a parade of dogs — not to mention several dozen sheep — all came under her care, healthy or lame.

Mary Sellmann operated the video camera for a series of videos she and Finn produced for area humane societies in which Finn appeared as a host of the show, featuring dogs, cats and bunnies available for adoption. The videos aired on local TV stations.

“She would make up something to say that would encourage people to come in and adopt them,” Sellmann said, noting that Finn could go on for more than 30 minutes talking about a single dog or cat, telling their back story, life at the shelter and describing their “personality.”

“Roz could talk,” Sellmann said, with a laugh. “She could just keep going.”

Her mother loved horseback riding across the Vermont landscape, Melanie said. “One of my favorite memories is riding behind her as she’s cantering ahead of me on this white horse,” she said. “We go through this tunnel of trees and come out into an open field and Mom just threw down the reins and threw up her arms and said, ‘Oh, this is so beautiful.’ ”

‘Not be quiet’

Farm life was demanding of her time, but Finn’s hospitality was legendary. She hosted dinners — always with a proper table setting of plates, cutlery, glasses and teacups-with-saucers — albeit, Melanie acknowledged, her mother’s cooking left something to be desired.

It was a family joke that when a roasted chicken came out of the oven still “half frozen,” her mother just shrugged it off, Melanie said. “Well, just eat the cooked parts,” Finn would tell her family.

“People came because it was fun, and Mum developed a great sense of humor,” Melanie said.

Finn accompanied Tori Lloyd on a three-day trip to Washington, D.C., when Lloyd was considering relocating there for work. The “three-day marathon” began with Finn surprising Lloyd with a “small thermos of white wine that she opened once we were seated” on the plane and proceeded through checking out neighborhoods, apartments, kids’ schools and befriending an Ethiopian cab driver.

Lloyd called the experience an example of Finn’s ability to not only “focus on the task at hand,” but also her gift “to make new friends along the way.”

In 1990, shortly before the Gulf War, Finn made a trip to the Palestinian territories, having previously gone on marches in support of Palestinians and with whose plight she sympathized.

“She went all by herself, a single woman,” Sellmann said. “I thought she was mad.”

Finn “came back with stories about how she met Palestinians, who were so wonderful to her, inviting her into their homes,” Sellmann remembered her friend relating. “She had strong feelings on political things and social things, but she didn’t hit you over the head with them.”

“She was very much for standing up for what she believed in,” said her son, Hugh Finn, citing his mother’s advocacy to end trapping in Vermont, which she described, in a newspaper letter as “legally inflicting pain on innocent, sentient animals by totally cruel and inhumane practices.”

“She thought if there were things you wanted to say you should not be quiet about it,” Hugh said.

A later self-reckoning

When Jim died in 2004, Roz sold the farm and initially moved into a house on Turnpike Road, and then later bought a place known as River Cottage, across from Coburn’s General Store in the village.

Now alone, Finn threw herself into volunteering and good works, becoming a justice of the peace and marrying dozens of couples; reading to kindergartners at The Newton School — where students named a snow plow in her honor — sponsoring a young girl in Tanzania through her secondary education and volunteering at a woman’s shelter in Chelsea.

River Cottage, which Finn painted in bright colors inside and the garage door in lavender, had an “old Vermont house quality to it, uneven floors, lots of little rooms, a tiny backyard,” said Erhard, who would often show up to troubleshoot what Melanie good-naturedly described as her “seemingly endless computer problems.”

“She liked to feed the birds, chipmunks and squirrels” — which Finn could recognize by sight — “and she had names for half of them,” said Erhard.

Although not wealthy, Finn, as she grew older, increasingly came to realize that as a white woman from an upper middle class background in a class-segregated society living in a post-colonial Africa she had benefited from a life of enormous privilege.

“Later in life she really looked back on her 20s and 30s and (was) in many ways embarrassed by her younger self,” Melanie said. Conversations with her mother brought to the surface how she had treated the “house staff,” or in the “traditional racism” and homophobia shared with her social circle.

“She certainly felt that there were a lot of questions that she hadn’t asked,” Melanie said. “And that probably is one of the things that fed into her being a kinder, more generous person in her later years, I think there was a sense of regret and guilt.”

Although Finn did not set foot into Vermont until her 40s, in many ways her life only really began — and changed — when she and her husband moved to the hillside farm in South Strafford.

“When she came to the U.S., it was a new start for her. And then also Vermont was another new start,” Hugh, her son, said. “The Upper Valley allowed her to be her.”

Contact John Lippman at jlippman@ vnews.com.