Having just counseled acceptance in the editorial above, we must report this week one of the most difficult things we have had to accept in a long while –– the death of Jean Loveland.

Mrs Loveland’s popular “Over The Back Fence” column has appeared in The Bee with few interruptions for more than 40 years. Her career in community journalism spanned 60 years. She worked as a correspondent and reporter for both the Bridgeport Post (now the Connecticut Post) and The Newtown Bee, writing for decades the news of her beloved Monroe, the hometown she adopted after she and her husband, the late Harold Loveland, settled there to raise a family.

Jean Loveland was a throwback to a time when reporters were both tough and understanding, pressed for time and patient, deadly serious and always ready for a joke. She wrote her columns in longhand, and all the notebooks, file folders, and clippings that crammed her workspace seemed to hold only a fraction of her vast knowledge of community life and human nature. Her columns are a treasure trove of information of Yankee life.

Jean Loveland liked to end her columns with a quotation, so we will do the same here. At her memorial service in Monroe on Tuesday, the printed program had as a postscript a quote from one of Mrs Loveland’s favorite writers, John Borroughs. It describes her well. “I still find each day too short / For all the thoughts I want to think, / All the walks I want to take, / All the books I want to read, and / All the friends I want to see.”