My smart and beautiful sister-in-law is totally a big city girl except when she is being the most inquisitive and fearless of naturalists. She and her husband left Boston after decades of careers and kids and moved to the edge of the intelligent world in the tiniest of towns on the Florida coast. She kayaks around the endless waterways in the area and collects creatures to bring home to her kitchen aquarium. It's ok if they're slimy. She makes a terrific white bean dip and an unbelievable key lime pie involving cream cheese. She's thrown herself into volunteer work with the elderly and with the local humane society. We have in common that we both read lots of books and frequently have similar reactions to them. So she was loving Joan Didion's marvelous book about the agony of losing her husband and tending to a critically ill daughter – The Year of Magical Thinking. The thing about the book is how it sort of parses the love of the long-married. A couple of years after reading it I still quote the widow's poignant discovery that while married to John she'd never aged. In him, to him, with him, she was always the 28 year old woman she'd been when their love was new. In his absence she saw herself for the first time as the rest of the world saw her – with all her wrinkles, her frailties, no longer beautiful. It's a wonderful book about love and loss and Trish sent me an email about it at the time she was reading it:

I'm mostly through Joan Didion's Year of Magical Thinking, and when Will asked for a synopsis over coffee this morning, I fumbled for a toehold - where to start? "Her husband died suddenly... "I offered. At which point Will asked what would I do? "Not enough caffeine yet to answer," I pleaded. "And you?" "Oh," he replied, "I'd sell the house, get a condo."