Music of the Night

This is another short-short story from Welsh Cakes: Book of Short Stories with a widow living alone and lonely, missing her husband's presence.
The venue of this story is a house in Toronto, where I lived for many years, and the situation is summed up in the following words from the story:
"She listened to the sounds of the night. The reggae music poured into the darkness and mixed with the sounds of laughter and bottle clinking. Smells of late night cooking rose from hibachis and seeped through her screened protection.
The Saturday summer gatherings were regular rituals in the back lane and Dorothy hated them. She knew that the morning would reveal unpleasant sights of litter, broken beer bottles and the mark of men on the garage doors; the smell would be rife in the hot humidity.
Even though she dreaded these nights, she felt sorry for these immigrants who were taken advantage of by landlords getting rich off their desperation. Dorothy understood their need to escape from the dark and airless rooms in which their poverty forced them to live; their need to go into the night air, to sit on fire escapes and in concrete yards without walls.
They were full of hope when they came to Canada, and an infusion of the music of their homeland was a renewal of optimism to them like an infusion of blood would replenish the white blood cells of a leukemia victim."
The story ends with a decision to make a new beginning:
"Dorothy rose from her bed and began another day of putting her life in order. She turned the radio up in an attempt to let its music and talk drown out her thoughts and heart beat. She had to stop grieving soon and listen for a new beat, a new song, a new voice. Perhaps today she would take her daughter’s advice and look for an apartment and open her heart to a fresh start. The music of the night had forced her into an awareness of a life grown stale. She made up her mind. She must begin again and this time she would, as the old song said, begin the beguine."