Deciding, as we have done on many previous occasions, to take advantage of the advance poll for the provincial election, we took ourselves along to the nearby community centre yesterday to do just that. The community centre is a large, sprawling complex that contains a very large wave pool, and it is where, when our granddaughter was four, we'd taken her for swimming lessons. It's where we staged her fifth birthday party, inviting her friends to an afternoon of swimming and to a reception room afterward where we served pizza and birthday cake.

It's also where the area library is contained. And where, yesterday, the advance poll opportunity was available. We'd get ahead of the crowds on voting day, we reasoned. There was a line-up, but it wasn't a very long one and it took little time to accomplish what we'd set out to do. Just ahead of us was an elderly couple whom I judged to be about our age. The man was tall, very white-haired and very annoyed. He'd found it difficult to locate just where the vote was taking place in the huge complex, whereas we came upon it immediately.

For him it must have been an additional nuisance because the woman whom we took to be his wife, a little overweight and clearly not moving with the grace of a teen, seemed to have some difficulty walking about. She confided to us that walking was not a problem so much for her, as standing. So my husband obligingly urged her to sit while she waited in line, pushing a nearby chair over for her to use, and she did just that.

To me, she said that they were there to vote early because they were about to embark on a family trip. Her brother-in-law had died the night before. Her siblings, in their 80s, she said in confidence, had died the year before, spaced a few months apart; a brother and two sisters. She laughed grimly and said to me that she thought her time had come as well, but there she was, still hanging on, the last of her generation, she said, and voting dutifully.

She was wearing light, colourful layers, very chic for a pleasantly warm day. Her hair had been recently done up professionally, and it was an almost-brassy bronze. Her makeup carefully applied over a face that was deeply lined in full ridges, because she was a large woman. She was wearing quite a lot of jewellery, among other things layers of bracelets and I wondered idly if she took them off herself and linked them anew each morning.

They had their turn preceding us and we laughed together that we had done our duty and went our separate ways. While she had been addressing me, her husband had been speaking with my husband. He seemed an aggrieved, aggressive type of personality, not the kind of person I would naturally turn to; my husband doesn't mind passing the time of day with anyone who behaves civilly.

We thought we'd take a walk over to the small 'office' where the Friends of the Library hold book sales, and there we became enthralled in the book offerings, scooping up each of us, the types of publications that have value to us, and feeling very good about it indeed.

My husband said to me, while we were browsing, Riley comfortably asleep in the pouch slung over my husband's shoulder, that the woman to whom I was speaking at the polling station was 93, and he had been speaking with her son.