Alert readers may have noticed that the photo of our beloved Great Pyrenees pooch Hannah has been removed from my cover page. When we lost her in June 2015, to acute leukemia, I couldn’t take her off the site for a long time. Everyone who met her knew what a special soul she was, and I couldn’t write about losing her without making it real. We should have had several more years of her mellow, calming presence. She trained us to be dog owners, and we will never forget her.

The kids and I wanted to adopt again right away, but Mr. A balked, and it was a good thing he did because otherwise P & Q would never have come into our lives. I’ll call them P & Q because we’ve given them slightly rhyming names and you’ll never keep them straight. They were part of a litter that was found starving in a field in Tennessee. Louie’s Legacy Rescue took them, fixed them up, and shipped them to New Jersey. They were taken in by their wonderful foster mother, who socialized them and taught them that they didn’t have to fight over food, that humans were safe to approach and accept love from, and that treats were the best thing in the world.

Today is the eighth anniversary of my dad’s passing. It’s also, to me, the first day of summer, because it’s June and I’m sorry but I’m not waiting till the 21st to feel summery. Coincidentally, these two things put me in mind of Pimm’s, that quintessentially British beverage; why they do this, I’ll get to in a minute.

My dad was the party guy. The whole neighborhood knew it. He worked and lived abroad, as a pilot, for large chunks of my formative years, which I now realize was very lonely for him, but when he came home he was the life and soul, and the G&Ts flowed freely. He worked this far from home so that he and my mother could afford boarding school fees for us three kids, for which I am eternally grateful. It was the greatest thrill of my life to hear his key in the lock after months away. The smell of aviation fuel and the sight of pilots in uniform still makes me feel like Santa’s arrived.

My husband made the bed for me the other day.

Not the regular, throw the sheets randomly over and sling a few pillows to the head of the bed way. Not even the strip the bed and change the sheets way. No; Mr. A put together our guest bed frame, which has been in pieces for months. He didn’t have to do this. We had a thousand jobs to do that day and we were both really busy and rather cranky. But he knew I’d like it so he did it. Now that’s a twenty-year-married kind of love.

[He and the girls had also brought me breakfast in bed, because we were going to be out of the house on Mother's Day and that's my favourite part of the day. Bless his cotton socks.]