"I seldom find myself blubbering over a book anymore. I used to do it when I was younger, but my insides seem to have toughened as I have aged. My sentimental side is harder to access, and even when a book evokes strong feelings I do not really cry. Well, Pilcher put the lie to that today. I cried like I was 15 again, felt foolish doing it, and felt clean and empty afterward.

OK, maybe I was just needing a good cry. It happens. But, there was something very touching in the way Pilcher presented this story; a truthfulness that made it special. It was a re-read, but goodness knows almost thirty years between reads made it brand new in many ways.

I thought of my own mother when I read these lines: "Yes, she was lovely. But more than that, she was warm and funny and loving. Hot-tempered one moment, and laughing the next. And she could make a home anywhere. She carried a sort of security about with her. I can't think of a single person who didn't love her. I still think about her every day of my life. Sometimes she seems very dead. And other times, I can't believe that she isn't somewhere in the house and that a door won't open and she'll be there."

For me, she nailed what it is to lose someone you truly love.

And this passage that might be best understood by someone my own age, and yet I know I must have understood it even when I was so young, reading this for the first time:

"A ring was the accepted sign of infinity, eternity. If her own life was that carefully described pencil line, she knew all at once that the two ends were drawing close together. I have come full circle, she told herself, and wondered what had happened to all the years. It was a question which, from time to time, caused her some anxiety and left her fretting with a dreadful sense of waste. But now, it seemed, the question had become irrelevant, and so the answer, whatever it was, was no longer of any importance."

Rosamunde Pilcher must have loved deeply, lost someone very close, known greedy and intemperate people, turned the earth in her own garden, shared meals with irreplaceable friends, and embraced a few kindred spirits in her day. She knows all those things too well to have made them up out of air. And, to some extent, that is what we all know of life. The details, the little things that make it bearable, the larger things that make it seems impossible to live through, these are the hallmarks of humanity. In the end, perhaps I cry not for the characters in a book but for myself."