Of all the messages I get, the sweetest are about love, which is not surprising. A writer – or a photographer, for that matter – hits home, feels the most satisfaction when he or she touches a chord, opens an emotion, generates a feeling. When I came to the farm six years ago, the last thing I ever though I would be writing about was loneliness or love, the stuff of poets and great novelists, subjects so vast and universal they are almost beyond the reach of the ordinary.
  Love has struck me at a relatively late point in life, although I can assure you it is never too late, at any age, to seek or feel love. I have also come to understand something about loneliness and disconnection. It is never too late to improve yourself, or to take responsibility for the way you feel. I would rather feel love for a week than loneliness for a lifetime.
  Coming to love when you are older is sweet in a particular way. It is more even, perhaps more knowing. When I fell in love, I was told by a friend that 75 per cent of second marriages fail. That people getting divorced ought not to fall in love, and should wait. Wait?, I thought. For what.
  And I remembered that nobody much in my life thought I ought to write about dogs or move to a farm either. If you let other people, or outside things, or bad news, or “this economy” or greedy corporations and uncaring bosses define you, they will be only too happy to oblige.
 Define yourself.
 To get to love, I also had to get through fear, and old and entrenched and unappetizing ways of thinking. If you don’t like yourself, I can’t imagine how anybody else can love you.
  Somebody asked me what it is like to be in love. It is good, I said. Maria draws love. When my dogs see her, they abandon me – except for Rose, of course – and sail happily off with her. Dogs read emotions better than people.
  Winston Churchill said once, at age 65, that for him, change is the same thing as rest. Amen.