Then I remembered, oh, that’s right, I can’t call Lorie Gregory. Lorie died.

All right, I’ll call her daughters, Suzanne and Wendy, I thought. Ask them if they’re looking at the sunset. But the thought of Lorie being gone had me too addled to remember their phone numbers right away, and by the time I got it straight, all the fire had drained from the clouds and the sky was just gray.

Suzanne and Wendy, like Lorie, are great appreciators of beauty in jewelry, handbags, clothing, music, the arts, nature- wherever they find it. One summer they dubbed the summer of Paul Matthews clouds. The three of them would sit out on their terrace in the afternoon and watch the clouds, which were spectacular that season, like clouds in Matthews’ paintings.

I have been looking back through my columns of the last 15 years, noting how often Lorie comes up. She enjoyed being mentioned, disguised as Laura. Some excerpts follow.

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“Don’t bring any more of that cheesecake into this house!”

MY friend Laura was laying down the law to her daughter Gwen when I arrived for dinner yesterday. She sounded as if she meant it.

“What cheesecake?” I of course immediately wanted to know.

“Kristy Deyo’s cheesecake,” Laura snapped. “She just opened a bakery in Keene.”

“What’s wrong with her cheesecake?” I asked.

Laura’s eyes grew misty and her voice went all dreamy.

“It’s too good!” she said. “It’s the dense, moist, old-fashioned kind. When I eat Kristy’s cheesecake, I feel like I’m back on Staten island, or in the streets of New York City when I was young.”

I was all set to have cheesecake for dessert, but they’d eaten it all.

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My friend Laura and I were sitting at her kitchen table, drinking coffee and looking out a morning sky hung with low, gray clouds, like so much old cotton underwear hung out to dry. Not the wispy lingerie clouds of May, but clouds like sodden union suits, or undergarments that had started out white but which no amount of chlorine bleach can ever restore to their former pristine glory. After a prolonged summer, this was the first day that reminded us of the inevitability of November.

Laura remembered when she was a little girl in the Thirties, living with her family on Staten island. At Thanksgiving, children from the Grymes Hill Orphanage came to the door to beg, dressed in rags and carrying burlap bags, their faces theatrically blackened with soot. Tough little faces, Laura said. Her father used to say “The ragamuffins are here.”

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My friend Laura and I have been irritable and miserable. We tried to come up with a reason for our state of mind. We had no problem identifying irritants; on the contrary. We identified everything and everybody we know, including each other. “I think it’s the time of year,” I told her. “Every year at this time (March) people are cranky.”

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My friend Laura brushed against her car door, then regarded the sleeve of her winter coat with evident distaste. The cuff was powdered with road salt, like a doughnut that covered in confectioner’s sugar. We were in Lake Placid to see a movie, “The girl with the Pearl earring,” at the Palace Theatre. There at Laura’s request, I was apparently one of the few women in the nation who had not read the book. It was still light out when we emerged from the theater into a cutting wind. Laura remarked that this movie, unlike, say, “Gangs of New York,” which we also saw together, was not violent. The story line was not complicated. There was nothing, in fact, to interfere with the luxurious sensation of immersion in the beauty of the scenes.

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My friend Laura just taught me how to knit. I can’t purl yet. So far, using bulky, variegated blue yarn, I have made a long, narrow scarf. The other day I brought my knitting to Laura’s, and we sat and talked over our needlework, going backward and forward in time, as women have done for thousands of years, and by so doing solved a great many of the world’s problems. We might have solved more, but at intervals we had to cease all activity and pay careful attention to the antics of Sonny, Laura’s favorite soap opera personality.

“Wait, wait, here’s Sonny!”

Aiming the remote at the set in an imperious manner, Laura increases the volume, and we hear Sonny and his wife speaking with great intensity, but very slowly, as if the director had told them to stall around because the script wasn’t long enough. I must say Sonny is intriguing, sort of a cross between a good guy and a bad guy.

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My friend Laura and I went to see “Pirates of the Caribbean,” with Johnny Depp as pirate Captain Jack Sparrow, at the Palace Theatre in Lake Placid. As the movie went on, Sparrow would not become romantic with the leading lady, played by Keira Knightley. Finally Sparrow was just about to kiss the girl, but instead fell over drunk. Laura was so disgusted she marched out of the theater.

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I miss you, Lorie.

Have a good week.