Your belle de jour Johanna is present my darling. Touching your hand...

Thinking of you very much, wondering where you are, here, there, or way up in the sky so high.

Up in the aerie. The sun has made an appearance this hour after a day of thunderstorms, some very dramatic, with ominous skies, flashes close by, billowing rumbles, dishevelling winds.

There's a big pan of Sicilian Spicy Chicken on the stove. I haven't made it in a while, that old delicious standby, but many of the ingredients were on the sale rack at the market yesterday: zucchini, peppers, tomatoes, russets.

I finished sewing a second beautiful apron. I've got the hang of it now, third one should be perfect. Not that one needs perfection in an apron, but I did make a few minor errors, for example, setting the neck straps of the bib too close to the sides so that I had barely enough material to turn under and finish the edges. It occurs to me that as a little thank-you for my friends I might make one and leave it for them in their kitchen. I don't know that they're apron people, in fact they seem hardly to cook at all for themselves, and I've made a note to bring down a couple of my dishtowels so that I don't use theirs. But they do enjoy beautiful domestic things, decorative dishtowels and the like, so I think they would be delighted to find a romantic print hanging from a peg on their ancient brick wall.

My darling, I think about you so much you'd be amazed. I lie down, close my eyes, and there you are, I have a whole film just about going in my mind, I keep playing the reels over and over, imagining touching you, imagining your touch. They're fragmentary though, one-sided, incomplete, they need your point of view, everything everything everything about you, the way you feel, what you give -

My love, assuming it's very late where you are, very many kisses good night, in the darkness, in the shadows, in the midst of soft covers and pillows, I lie next to you, loving you.