The drawing looked like an arrow pointing out of a cloud. Astronomer Lale found it among routine weather notes and could not make it fit the observer's usual symbols. He had died before the notebooks were catalogued.
A letter from his wife explained that she walked the lower path at the same hour each afternoon. When cloud prevented his work, he drew a small arrow beside the weather entry and went down to meet her. The symbol recorded a change of plan rather than a feature of the sky.
Lale found weeks without arrows during the wife's illness, then one final arrow beside the words stayed home. The private shorthand had changed meaning as their circumstances changed. A symbol key alone would not have explained it.
She catalogued the drawing with the letter, keeping the observational data distinguishable from the personal annotation. At the next cloudy open night, visitors gathered inside instead of seeing the stars. Lale showed them the notebook. Its small arrow offered another way to understand an interrupted evening: not every failed observation meant that nothing worth recording had happened.