A melancholy day, with the loss of Luciano Pavarotti and the voice that can move me to tears.

I distract myself by looking through old pictures, and of course some of them provoke a sad nostalgia as well.

But here is a picture I love. Our First Dinner Party, held in the dappled shade of a huge cherry tree growing at Husband's parents' orchard home. It was probably late June or early July of 1945, just a few months after we were married.

I don't recall the menu, but the guests have lived in our hearts a long, long time. They were also newly married.

I blow up the picture as large as I can, and study faces and expressions, and the memories come flooding back. There is my darling new husband, and I am smiling at him with delight.

George, with the curly hair, was a childhood friend of Husband's. He and Kay had just graduated from Vancouver Art School, and we ran into them by chance on the street in the City, whilst on our honeymoon.

They soon returned to Penticton, and began constructing a wonderful home/studio from the old barn on George's father's orchard. For a while Charles helped him. They were neighbours and lived in a small house on the top of a hill above the barn-cum-home-studio while it was being renovated. We shared many meals after this first one, but apart from the friendship I learned to value the things they both taught me. To see and absorb the gorgeously subtle colours that are so prevalent in the Okanagan rocks and hills and grasses, and repeated here in the Similkameen - a wonderful introduction to music and art, - and conversation that opened up my rather limited and naive world.

A fond recollection that lightens the melancholy and makes me grateful for the things that come one's way.

Here are the street pictures as we were in those dear old days of long ago.