Yesterday we went along to our local Sally Ann thrift shop with bags of soft-back novels, videos, dishes, replaced light fixtures, clothing and other items that were ready to shed, perfectly usable and recyclable. We always look around while we're there, for other items that other people have brought in, that might be of interest to us. It's where we acquire most of our reading material. And I, my wardrobe, truth to tell. And have, for many years.

Almost immediately upon entering I came face to face with an old friend. Smiling, as usual, declaring how glad she was to see me. She had asked after me, she said, a week earlier, when my husband had dropped by to look around at the videos. I knew, I told her, and I was glad to see her, too. As usual she looked as though she were pregnant, just as she did when we first met so long ago. She isn't, and she is a slight woman, delicately built, so I cannot imagine why her stomach protrudes as it does.

She told me years ago that she was from, I believe, Sudan. That was back when our granddaughter was very young and we were her day-care providers while her mother worked. We used, to, on occasion, take her there to look about for toys to supplement the ones she had. She has always been a friendly, open person, and I was always glad to see her. I felt fortunate, in fact, that she was so open and friendly, glad to be greeted familiarly by her. And I returned that familiarity and open greeting, to a good extent.

She is always dressed well, has an air of being confidently comfortable within herself. She is a devout Christian, speaking always of her faith, and I know she is a regular church-goer, since she has mentioned that to me. I know also that to arrive at her place of work, the closest Salvation Army thrift shop to where we live, she has to travel by public transit quite a distance. She is married, but seldom speaks of her husband. She has told me that she spends roughly three hours each day, going to the store from her home and then back again.

She never, ever complains. She enjoys her work, and is grateful to have this job. I don't believe she has ever looked elsewhere for another place to work because she is comfortable where she is. She believes in being grateful for what one has, not being resentful for what one has not got. And she tells me this. She tells me other things, her concern for her extended family members because of unrest and violence in her home country. She is glad to be in Canada, sad that her family is elsewhere.

She asks continually about our daughter, since I once told her, at her querying, that our daughter's occupation is one of instability, looking for work contracts, with occasional stints of troubling unemployment. She asks also about our granddaughter, having last seen her when she was young; when children reach their teens it is with great annoyance on their part that they be taken to second-hand shops; when they reach mid-teens they will not be moved to enter such places.

Our relationship is not quite that of equals. I admire her tenacity of spirit and hopefulness, her resolute comfort in her faith, her unfailing good spirits, although I have seen her pensive and almost sad. She feels free to ask anything of me. I would like to ask things about her personal life as she does with me, but I feel constrained. It's the Canadian in me, I think, that makes me hesitate to seem to be prying.

Several slight, relatively speaking, events yesterday, both life-affirming and a reminder that death is part of life, at least the conclusion of it; that all living organisms make their gradual way toward that final repose. Early morning, when we take our two little dogs out to the back garden, there was a bluejay on the fence, with a peanut. Helping himself to the few that I put out nightly for the squirrels to discover the following day.

Later in the day my husband brought my notice to an unusual sight; from the dining room windows we saw a tiny green frog, the size of a Spring Peeper, sitting on the outside windowsill. We wondered where it had come from. We do have a woodland creek running through an urban forest in a ravine up the street from our house. An awfully long way for a creature so tiny to venture from. And why a windowsill when he could have the cover, comfort and moisture of the garden that sits below it?

Out went my husband to gently pluck the miniature frog off the windowsill, with the intention of walking down to the creek and depositing it there, a far more congenial and life-supporting, natural environment for a wee amphibian. Too late, it was dead, its miniature green body in quiet repose, not merely taking a quiet break, as we initially thought. And it became evident to us how it had met its final moments; we hadn't noticed its presence in the dark of night as we routinely cranked the window shut the night before, trapping our tiny visitor between window panes, to asphyxiate.

Later in the afternoon when we were out in the ravine for our daily ramble with our two little dogs, we fed squirrels, those bold enough to approach and others who waited patiently for us to deposit peanuts in the usual cache-places. Among the boldest are the tiny chipmunks who are generally more aloof and shy during the summer months, who seem to appear in the fall to diligently gather their winter store.

The maturing garden, both in the sense of its longevity and its seasonal maturation, requires continual cut-back to ensure tidiness. Ornamental trees and shrubs, like any other growing organism, take all the advantage they can out of the growing season. Once they've been firmly and comfortably established they begin to put on height and width and simply grow into the space permitted them by presumably judicious planting.

And of course the gardener, before even planting, must try to take into account the space that any single tree or shrub will require to fit comfortably into the entire garden picture envisioned in the head of that very same gardener. It's difficult when faced with a tabula rasa, a blank slate, to imagine how trees will eventually begin to fill in the landscape. Coupled with that difficulty is the desire to fill in the landscape as swiftly as possible to attain that mature garden look.

Most of us are impatient to achieve the look of a well-balanced, mature garden, so we tend to leave less space between growing trees and shrubs and perennials that will grow to their eventually mature size, than we should. It's always difficult to imagine how well growing things will occupy their space and nudge their neighbours.

We're facing that problem now, when our trees and shrubs have achieved their mature size, and are still reaching out in all directions. On our front walk leading to the porch, trees are over-reaching themselves, in the sense that the lovely bower effect that has been achieved also presents as a challenge to clear and easy movement.

The garden as impediment to flow. Well, that requires well-intentioned and clear foresight, but failing that, a good, sharp pair of clippers.

One's children are precious beyond description, they never cease to inhabit their parents' thoughts and concerns. Grandchildren, on the other hand, occupy quite another, very particular place in their grandparents' inner sanctorum. What they represent has been described time and again by psychologists, social scientists, parents and grandparents themselves although the relationship, enduring and deep-seated is again, beyond mere descriptive words.

That very special bond between grandparents and grandchildren, where it exists, helps shape the most intimate recesses of a child's mind. As for the grandparents, the deepest satisfaction, for want of a better word, resides in the interaction between grandparent and grandchild. All the more so when the grandchild initiates that ongoing contact.

From the pedestrian to the most uplifting experiences shared, time exchanged between the two has a depth of meaning that reaches the deepest emotional and spiritual level, for it represents on a biological level the meaning of life itself. Time will erase the grandparents' existence but a minuscule portion of it is carried forward by the grandchild.

The timeless, endless cycle of mind and energy transference from one living organism to another, the cycle of life and nature's still-ambiguous purpose is illuminated by our puny human existence. Love transcendental.

Those who have not experienced that most elementally primal of attachments and continuum will have missed the deep meaning of life.

About five years ago my family doctor referred me to an optometrist when I remarked that I felt there might be something wrong with my eyes because of having experienced odd symptoms like brief blinding light after having gotten up during the night. And a few recurring episodes of shooting stars. That optometrist had all her patients routinely fill out a questionnaire which appeared to me to be all about product advertising and consent, through providing your name, address, telephone number and email address to receiving public relations advertising from all manner of optometrist-allied manufacturers and suppliers of goods and services.

I was decidedly unimpressed and refused to complete the survey/questionnaire/authorization, which annoyed her office manager no end, who insisted that all patients are 'required' to comply. My equal insistence that this was unprofessional, intrusive and unethical brought the optometrist, a young woman, out from the back offices, demanding to know 'what was going on'. When informed by her irate office manager 'what was going on', the optometrist glared at me, turned to her employee and said the procedure could be suspended on this occasion.

I should have left that office either then, or when I understood what the double-faced data-collection sheet I was instructed to complete represented, but I did not. During the course of the examination, a stone-faced, civilly-unresponsive professional led me through the requisite series of tests, and eventually produced a prescription for lenses. I had particularly emphasized my concern that something 'organic' might have been going awry with my eyes, and she had said, firmly, that there was nothing wrong.

She was not present to fit me with the resulting eyeglasses, ordered from her stock of available frames. But the ill fit of the frames was only one thing; the more important one was that I found the prescription lenses far too strong, so I simply resorted to returning to the eyeglasses that I had formerly worn, non-prescription, over-the-counter glasses that seemed far more suited to my needs.

Five years later, after a surgical procedure to close a gap in the vitreous of my left eye, which had been the very eye that had presented with symptoms, I visited another optometrist, one who had recommended me to the city's top ophthalmologist who had performed the vitrectomy.

The resulting eyeglasses, with the new formula for 'progressive' lenses, which would aid both my short- and long-range vision, seem not quite what I had envisioned when I anticipated a great improvement in my vision, particularly my short-range vision. The prescription that resulted from this latest round of vision tests appears to be far less capable of magnifying sufficiently to reflect my new needs than the old ones I'd formerly felt to be too strong for my needs.

It seems I've progressively grown into the old prescription, while the new one now fails to meet my needs. Some story this is.

Although we had never been privileged to experience the sight of the two adult great barred owls closely monitoring the experimental nest-leaving of their fledgling, we knew two ravine acquaintances who had, and they had regaled us with their appreciative sightings of the events. We did have the good fortune of seeing one of the adults and the more fully-grown juvenile being accosted by outraged robins - of all birds - on one occasion.

The two owls, as seems their custom, simply were unperturbed at all the racket caused by the outraged and hysterical pair of robins. It was long past nesting time so we hardly knew what caused the outrage; simply territorial, one might assume. But the ravine was as much the territory of the owls and the hawks who came around continually and nested there, as it was robins and crows, the two species we'd thus far seen reacting so territorially to the presence of (hungry, omnivorous) owls.

We hear the presence of the owls far more frequently than those rarer occasions when we actually see them, ensconced on branches, and invariably there are hysterical crows (once the hawks) circling furiously and vociferously around them. Yesterday we heard the unmistakable long, drawn-out hooting of an owl, repeating and repeating itself. We were convinced, by the quality of the last note of the call that it was a human trying out their owl-hooting skill, to attract a response.

We did, soon after, hear a response, a single caw. And we laughed, assuming that the person had attracted the attention of a crow, not an owl. Soon afterward, as we continued our trail hike, and approaching the conclusion of our hour-and-a-half round trip, there was a growing racket of an assemblage of furious crows nearby, circling above and within the canopy, and we realized, belatedly, that it had been no human we'd heard, but an owl.

He is a dapper, dark-haired, mustachioed and exceedingly genial man. And so meticulous in performing the services of his profession that my husband was very impressed, and recommended him to me. As did the optometrist whom my husband had also recommended to me. And with whose own services my ophthalmologist was aware and congenial with, all the more so when digital pictures of the back of my eyes were present in my files at his office the day following having been taken.

On my second visit to his shop, to have the two frames containing my new progressive lenses fitted, I learned much about the man, as he effusively spoke to someone he must have felt was a sympathetic listener. It would not be the first time by any means that people whose acquaintance I had just made and whose personal lives were unknown and of no interest to me revealed their innermost feelings and emotional needs.

What I learned as I made an especial effort to heed what he was saying and to support him in his obvious distress was:

• He belongs to the B'hai religion and is of Persian extraction
• He has been twice married, once divorced
• He is desperately searching for a new companion, convinced this second marriage is over
• He is experiencing much difficulty finding a woman who might wish to share his life
• He is inordinately disappointed that there are so few women wishing to commit themselves
• He is amazed at the modern woman who is interested in engaging in sexual union before becoming familiar with the character of her partner
• He is disappointed at the mendacious interest by women in his financial status

I listened as he explained his second wife, a former widow with two somewhat mature sons, was too much under the influence of her brother. And that her family was a deterrence to their tight communion as husband and wife. He got along well with the older of his wife's two sons, but not the younger who, like her extended family, chose to find fault with him, her husband.

He wanted a divorce from this current wife. She wanted to remain in wedlock, but not in the kind of traditional marriage that appealed to him. She visualized their continued living together as man and wife, but not quite as man and wife; more for convenience and occasionally, hands-off companionship. He found this unsuited to his needs, though he was a patient man, he said.

He had tried Internet dating, and had indeed gone out on several occasions with women, one of whom insisted she had to find out directly through having sex initially whether he represented good marital potential for her, before committing to follow-up dates. How he was put off by this, explaining to her that while sex was important in a marriage, emotional and intellectual compatibility were more important to him.

Other women seemed more interested in his material assets, eager to know whether he had a house of his own, and whether he still paid a mortgage on it. He was put off when a woman he met on line agreed to going out for dinner, and then chose the most expensive restaurant in town.

I suggested some success might be found in mutual acquaintances recommending their friends to one another, and he said he'd been that route, telling me in some detail about several women who had been recommended to him by friends and how they had turned out to be dead ends because again, they were more concerned with material assets than emotional compatibility.

I recommended he be patient with his current wife, that the alteration in their relationship that she wished for might work to his advantage after all, because he is consumed with the wish not to live alone, having done so for five years between wives and having found it not at all to his liking. He listened, but his lip curled in derision when he responded that he could not 'trust' his current wife.

On several occasions he briefly excused himself when he had to tend to other clients, and I sat there, wishing I could escape, feeling I could not gracefully make my exit, as he had not completed the fitting process. The anguished reportage continued and my cautious recommendations did as well, until finally another client appeared and I was able to hastily gather my newly-acquired eyeglasses, wish him the best of luck, and depart.

On my way out, he called after me not to forget him and to please contact him if I had anyone of the gentle sex to recommend to him.