My friend of 70 years, Sylvia Huntley Horowitz, writes a private blog, available only to subscribers. She is avyear old than I am — we met at Oberlin. But much more active. She lives alone with her cat Frankie, but family lives nearby and she sees them frequently. She hosts a Sabbath meal almost every Friday, for family and occasional rabbis. A five-mile walk every week with fellow-retired-faculty from the local university. And much else. The last message I had from her was on Saturday. Thanksgiving had been cleared away, the good plates washed and dried by hand and carefully replaced in their cupboard. Then a substantial party went out to an Indian restaurant to celebrate her great-grandson Mendel’s second birthday. He cheerfully ate Indian food, Sylvia reported.

  Then in the next few hours she fell and hit her head and had a stroke — I do not know the sequence of those events — and died in hospital a few hours later.

   I am shaken, and very sad. It is, for Sylvia, a very enviable death. But for me another black day in a black season. We've just had my husband’s birthday. We are a couple of days away from the anniversary of saddest day in my family history.  

 I failed at Wordle today, which seems rather appropriate. I achieved grn, grn, ???, ???, grn by line 3, and persistently guessed wrong. Mark had that configuration too, for a while, but shook himself out of it in time to score six. Five for Alexander and Thomas. Four for Rachel, Ketki, Theo and Roger.