I lost a feather the other day and I understand this does not qualify as news. But I want to say—for the record—that this was a really nice feather. I paid good money for it and pinned it to my favorite blue hat. I wore that hat out for a walk, one evening, when it was chilly. This was the last night that my husband, Peter, and I were in Frigiliana, a little town in the south of Spain. I walked to the top of the very steep hill where, four hundred years ago, a Moorish castle stood, guarding the town from ...