A number of you have touched me sweetly this month, noticing it’s some weeks since I blogged. Attention feels like love: thank you for caring.

My half-excuse has been wave after wave of summer visitors, my attention going in their direction!

And – I’ve been on a mission: gathering up the insights of the book coach I met with in June, and a UK Arts Council funded online course run by an indie publisher in August. Equipped with a fresh vision for how to ‘fix’ my manuscript, I’ve been taking Novel One to a fifth – and final! – draft. Huge fun – except while being so focused and driven, I’ve been entirely incapable of making myself keep to my blog schedule. Please don’t let that be my public gone!

Naturally, it’s meant a lot to my husband and me to see friends from the most recent previous chapter of our lives.

But alongside these close – personally speaking – happily living folk, it’s been a season of losing significant, celebrated figures from the generation above us; who, reaching their bodies’ natural limits, have died.

I was near to tears during Dolly Parton’s family representative’s official statement: ‘We are not sad for Dolly … Dolly has lived in the light, and is in the arms of Jesus.’ Amen to that.

And then Wendell Berry, of ‘The Peace of Wild Things’ fame, found himself a place to lie down for good, even more perfect than ‘where the wood drake / rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds’; and an icy current blew through the resulting gap in my universe.

But Wendell had a trick up his sleeve for me, a lesser known poem that perfectly answers all our griefs. I can cheerfully count his thoughts among ‘Les choses en rose’, because without a doubt – he’s home.

I offer it here as a companion piece to my last blog, because it speaks to that too.

The Loved Ones

The loved ones we call the dead

depart from us and for a while

are absent. And then as if

called back by our love, they come

near us again. They enter our dreams.

We feel they have been near us

when we have not thought of them.

They are simply here, simply waiting

while we are distracted among

our obligations. At last

it comes to us: They live now

in the permanent world.

We are the absent ones.

Poem by Wendell Berry, author, Kentucky farmer, environmentalist, who died on 31^st August, 2026, aged 92.

With the promise of plenty more from me soon.