I made your sweet potato muffins last weekend and they were as wonderful as I ever imagined they would be. Thank you so very much for the recipe–I will bake them many times again.

I am teaching an ESL course and I had noticed on Saturday that my audience, very different from the corporate seminar audience or college student audience I am accustomed to, was sometimes so hungry that it was difficult for them to concentrate on the 3-hour lesson. Sunday morning I decided to prepare food for the class and at six o’clock in the morning I rustled around my kitchen to see what I had to work with. I had a sweet potato and suddenly remembered your recipe that I had put into my notes so many months ago. I baked your sweet potato muffins and some zucchini bread and put together a basket of apples and oranges. The food was awesome and for the first time my students (mostly immigrant men but a couple of women) didn’t look at me with hungry eyes while practicing English.

While I was baking your recipe I thought of how a little bit of you is here and as well a little bit of you is all over the country, in all the many readers who have loved your words and have been nourished or nurtured by your writing. Like a fragrance that travels in the wind, you are in the hearts of more people than you can count. Your writing is beautiful (I confess I have envied your ability to write as well as you do). I wish you many, many blessings not only on your continued writing but with everything you do. Thank you for your courage, thank you for your wisdom, thank you for your strength, and thank you for your beauty. You have been admired. You have been appreciated. And you will be missed.