Live on a street long enough and not only do you become familiar with most of your street neighbours but you also become acquainted with neighbours living on the street behind you.

We had decided last night, to have a light, simple dinner. We have non-meat-based meals frequently, and this would be one of them. We had just finished our garden salad, and I was preparing to cook our cheese-herb omelletes when the doorbell rang.

Turned out to be one of our neighbours who lives behind us, whom we see once a year when he circulates on the nearby streets to garner support for his annual Terry Fox run. He's a soon-to-be-retired military man who has reached the apex of his career. He is friendly and outgoing, manifestly physical; stalwart, tall, energetic and muscular. And he's a runner.

He has connected his passion for running (for which he has garnered his own share of winning medals) to his concern for raising funds for cancer research. And we always support his efforts.

At the door, my husband exercised his usual effusive welcome and the two men spoke for a lengthy period of time. Since I had already begun the omelette process this was rather concerning, but I had no intention of interrupting a lively conversation.

There were no complaints issued by my husband, nor me, when he finally sat down across from me at the dinner table, to partake of a meal that was not presented at the top of its form.

It's been some while since we last saw Max in the ravine. And there he was, yesterday, forging his way along the trails, in his crisp, white long-sleeved shirt that he wears constantly, plying his ski poles to propel him along, winter and summer.

Oddly, as often happens, I was thinking of him that very morning. And there he was. Before engaging in our usual greeting, I blurted out the information I'd seen in the morning's newspaper about a new provincial government initiative to encourage the infirm and the elderly to remain living in their own homes rather than become a burden on the already-overtaxed hospital and elder-care infrastructure. Government would kick in up to $1600, I believe it was, for a total $10,000 personal expenditure to help make a home more wheelchair accessible, to transforming bathrooms and other areas in the house as assists to the severely health-compromised whose mobility has been affected.

Which gave him the opportunity to launch into a description of the routine of his life, assisting his wife in the mundane daily routines of eating, washing, going to the bathroom. He had to wait, he explained, before he was free for an hour to embark on his daily ravine-rambling routine, until his wife had properly gone to the bathroom, he had assisted her in the shower, helped her feed herself, and was prepared to rest for a few hours on her own.

He recounted his recent perplexedly-disappointing attempts at accessing - even discovering what was available - through the provincial assistance programs. He had been assured he was on a 'high-priority' list, although he had been waiting a long, long time to have a program-sponsored evaluator visit and explain to him and his wife what might be available to them in home assistance.

He would hate, he said, solemnly, to view the length of a low-priority list.

Many years ago our son and daughter-in-law discovered a small, hand-cranked ice-cream maker, bought one for themselves and one for us, and proceeded to make their own ice creams from fresh fruit, yogurt and a number of ingredient combinations. The one they bought for us languished in our cupboard, brought out for use only when they visited and used it themselves to treat us to their brand of home-made ice-cream.

Recently we had another good look at the ingredients on commercial ice cream, after having read a kind of expose on what many of the chemicals included are also used for and decided we'd be better off foregoing that stuff. We looked around for that little hand-cranked thing, and it was nowhere to be found.

So my husband proceeded to do what he usually does when he's fixated on something, went out and procured an ice-cream maker. They're not easy to come by, sold for the most part only at household and kitchen specialist shops. The one he bought was many times larger, infinitely more simple to use because it was electrically mechanical.

This time when our son and daughter-in-law visited it was my husband who made ice-cream: vanilla on one occasion and chocolate on another, and since I'd baked a chocolate cake in honour of my daughter-in-law's birthday, the combination was irresistible.

There was a time, years past, when we enjoyed the company of so many other ravine walkers with their dogs. They're all gone now. We're the only ones left, with our 19- and 12-year-old little dogs. The other dogs, gradually gone. Their owners no longer finding a reason to venture into the ravine for long, leisurely nature walks. And they're older too, perhaps less inclined to challenge their physical resources.

So we were pleasantly surprised to come across an old friend walking with one of his two thirty-year-old sons who had recently adopted a rescue dog, which just happened to be a Great Dane, a superb creature.

Sydney, he told us, was long gone. At sixteen he had more than lived his life span, a beloved canine companion. He explained that when they'd taken him to the groomer's for his usual tidying up, she had noted he was bleeding from his mouth.

Sydney was a fairly small dog, perhaps small-to-medium, a mixed spaniel-terrier, it seemed, off-white, with hair that tended to grow quite unruly. He had his quiet enthusiasms, and was an extremely good-tempered animal. His owners devoted to his care and a deep appreciation for his company.

A visit to the veterinarian revealed he had a malignant cancerous mass in his mouth. Soon afterward, he said, surgery was done to remove the mass. It gave him an additional three months of life, before they understood they could no longer hold him to life because he was suffering too greatly. And they were forced to make that final decision.

They won't, he told us, attempt to replace him. They're too old to start all over again. And truth to tell, for them Sydney was irreplaceable.

Back to shopping once again - and have been for quite some time - at the good old supermarket that is far too small, too crammed, narrow aisles, but the selection just suits me fine, along with the prices, lower by far than all of its competitors. It's what it has made its reputation on, after all. And its title, Food Basics, adequately describes - or described - the type of products it made available to its customers.

That has changed over the years, as it has stocked up increasingly on more selections that emphasize what the consumer wants - or at least a goodly proportion of the consuming public - namely, more highly processed foods, like frozen dinners and pre-packed, pre-prepared meats and salad vegetables. Still, compared to other supermarkets, with their emphasis on selling electronics, clothing, housewares and all manner of other goods to complement the food they sell - sometimes it seems the reverse - this one represents a more comfortable fit for me.

It isn't to last, I know, since the franchisee is in the process of building a far larger structure nearby to which, in a few months' time, the store is scheduled to move. Enabling them to accommodate and introduce into their aisles and shelves, all the irritating items apart from comestibles that all the other supermarkets sell; bedding, housewares, clothing, etcetera.

The supermarket has latterly plastered its windows with signage reading "300 food items price-reduced!", which reads very nicely, but as I commented rather sourly to the store manager yesterday, those signs should be removed and replaced with others reading "600 food items price raised!", to more accurately reflect reality.

Thank heavens for mature gardens whose backbones of trees, shrubs and perennials are so dependable to offer seasonal texture, fragrance and colour to the garden. Necessitating that the care-giver of that garden invest relatively few hours of maintenance. Some weeding time, some tidying, and a little more time spent in shaping and cutting back rampant growth.

Fact is, there has been so much happening during these summer months that it's just as well the focus of the garden occurs in the spring, and that's when most of the labour is undertaken to ensure the garden looks its best throughout the months that are destined to succeed.

Most of our garden clean-up is done in preparation for the winter months, so we tend to that heavy-lifting in the fall. There's enough work in the garden come spring, without the massive work of garden clean-up, cutting back perennials, lifting the annuals out of their pots, emptying the pots of soil in preparation for next year's planting.

So it's a relief not to have to spend an inordinate amount of time doing garden maintenance during the hot months of summer, to be able to enjoy the various splendid flowering plants that present in succession for our enjoyment. And, of course, the lovely annuals which labour on imprssively to give us those exciting punches of colour and form, separate and above from the perennials.

All they require from us is a little tenderness and a lot of moisture, and we're amply rewarded.

It leaves me confused. Wondering what exactly it is that causes me to have such a lack of confidence in my faculties. Leaving me feeling inadequate, as though I am no longer in control of myself, my ability to negotiate myself around in the small part of the world that I inhabit. I know that I've been isolating myself to a degree. I've been unwilling to go out and about normal types of activities that would take me away from home.

I find comfort in the predictable, in routine, in being at home. There I am able to exercise authority over my responses. I can negotiate everything. Outside, when I'm exposed to the outer world, however narrow the framework, my lifetime of self-assurance becomes thinner. This is just, I know, an emphasis due to age, common in youth and the impaired, to the normal human condition. Not that other animal forms don't seek comfort in the familiar.

I suppose it might have a great deal to do with the episode, now a year in the past, of having to be admitted to the emergency department of our local hospital when I realized something was organically and by all the manifestations being demonstrated, quite wrong with me, internally. A month later however, I was restored to my full physical capacities, and more. Yet my confidence in myself appears to have been quite disturbed.

This, despite having the good fortune of a life-companion who knows me as intimately as I know myself. Who insisted that we retreat this summer from our home for our usual week away in the wilderness area of another country. And where I discovered that I was indeed still capable of meeting physical challenges.

Yesterday, when I exited the hospital after seeing the opthalmalgic eye surgeon who had given me the regrettable information that the retinal tear in my left eye, a 'fourth stage' event, had returned, I was of course, disappointed. Admittedly, my eyes had been copiously and irritatingly eye-dropped previous to examination, and this created an unclear vision for me, apart from the distortion that the tear had created.

Yet I felt inadequate and confused, and incapable as I sought to identify our car with my husband awaiting my presence so we could return home. I felt like a child, helpless, or close to that, in the face of a world I wasn't quite familiar with.