Two butterflies with stars design

The lodgers have gone back to Leeds and the bunting is down, so I finally have a quiet hour to tell you about the moth that got into the dining room on Tuesday. Mr Okafor from number four caught it in his hat and carried it out to the garden like a sacred thing, and when he came back he said the wings were pink underneath, not brown as he'd thought, and that he'd never seen anything so pleased with itself. I laughed until I had to sit down on the hall stairs.

Something of yours is still on the top shelf of the linen cupboard. Your tin of fishhooks and a bundle of postcards with the stars printed in the corners, the ones you bought from the chandler's the summer before you left. I kept meaning to post them. Instead I found myself lining them up on the kitchen table after supper, pink and violet and that dull cornflower blue, and I thought about how you used to say the sea looked like it had been stirred with a spoon.

Anyway, the reason I write is the window. Ruth Patch came up from the village with a pot of paint, which I thought was a mad idea, and we spent a wet afternoon painting two butterflies on the front room glass with stars scattered round them. Mrs Lowe says it will wash off with the first hard rain, and I hope she's wrong. The bigger one sits above the bay, the smaller one down low by the step, as if one of them has come up from the beach to see who's coming in.

Come home at Christmas if the boat allows. There's a room made up that looks straight over the harbour, and I will leave the light on in the porch, the way Father did. Ada.