It’s Thursday. You know the routine. Three beautiful things from the last week:

1. I had a letter from an elderly neighbor from my childhood home yesterday. She lost her husband this winter and her last two letters have included notes about how much she misses him. In her first letter she wrote that they’d been married 50 years and that it hadn’t been enough. Yesterday’s letter included a note that she didn’t understand how much you could miss someone until this happened. Remarkably sad, yes. But beautiful, too.

2. I’ve had a rough month. And Rudi’s been there every step of the way. Sometimes he loses patience with me (I do, too, for the record), but generally he is wonderful and supportive, giving me a shoulder to cry on, dessert to drown my sorrows in, and a pair of ears when I need to rehearse my presentation “just one more time.”

3. The last week has been miserably hot and humid — the sort of weather one can cope with in August or, presumably, if one lives in the Deep South. Sometime yesterday, the humidity broke, giving me a beautiful evening to sit outside and read until the light faded.