Three beautiful things from the past week:

1. A tourist family walks past me one morning. The mother, hugging her pre-teen daughter to her hip, beams down at her proudly. The girl looks delighted. This strikes me as an Our Town moment, so I’m preserving it in history for the two of them here.

2. A trio of babies came into my world this week. One, Audrey, is six months old and belongs to Dini, a video journalist friend from the last political campaign. We hadn’t seen her since her son was a baby (maybe three years ago?) until we ran into them Sunday afternoon on our walk home from the farmers’ market. Two others were born this week: Derek to a college friend, Lunesse, and Jack to a colleague of mine, Angelique.

3. Not wanting to miss the early-morning lunar eclipse this week, Rudi and I set our alarms for 5:30 a.m. We rise silently and dress and head outdoors. Not surprisingly, we cannot see the area of the sky necessary from our corner, so we zig-zag down the road to a clearing. Low clouds have rolled in along the horizon, obscuring the pre-dawn sky. “It definitely looks darker than usual over there,” I say hopefully, pointing toward the west. Rudi agrees but also suggests we will probably not see much more than that darkness and that we should return home to bed. We stumble back to the Burrow and are asleep almost immediately.