One always wonders what’s just around the bend. My mother's grown old; my father's gone on ahead, and I covet the time left to know her and other aging family members, to love and care for them – now that it’s come to this time in all our lives.

O reversal of days – that we should end up carrying the ones who have carried us.

My mother is doing so well, younger even, her years extended I’m sure by living with my sister, Beth and sleeping each night in a condo-bedroom that is scarcely 100 yards from the place where she was born over 93 years ago, on her father's Burlington farm.

Before his death in 2007, every blood transfusion my father received (3 bottles one day I visited since his haemoglobin was down to 69) perked him up for several weeks – with new and rich supply of oxygen to the brain, so that he knew me – almost, though sometimes still mistaking me for his younger brother ‘Bert’ who even then had gone before to the Bright Country.

Still, in one way, at least in a Christian way, I was and remain also a brother to my Dad.

Praying and visiting then, as Dad's life deteriorated, I tried to juggle and fight into proper priority what seemed to be a jangled mix of many irrelevant, once-thought important, demands upon my energies and time. I don't think I ever got that right, nor do I now.

But I try.

It's September as I write, but Winter is coming, has come.