Received an email with news from an Edmonton Priory member driving the seven hours from Edmonton to Fort Saint John in October…”Going up the sky was cloudy with what appeared to be the beginnings of a storm. The interplay of light and dark and refracted color made the sky appear positively biblical. ” This photo was taken closer to home, near Lancaster. Thanks to the reader who sent the file this afternoon. Very uplifting photograph, especially helpful since I’m traveling, briefly, through cape disappointment. It happens.

Of course Cape Disappointment is an actual place at the mouth of the great Columbia River. I’m not sure why Lewis and Clark named it thus, perhaps because they were expecting something and when they got to the end of the trail, it wasn’t there. Expectations can lead to disappointment, for sure.

I have switched on the facility that enables comments to be moderated. What this means in practice is your comments will not appear immediately you post them, as they have done in the past.

It would be a rare comment that I would not publish and I’m sad that the need for me to moderate them has arrived.

So be it.

The other day while cruising through one of our vestibules I bumped into this crew of geriatric vacuum cleaners waiting to be sent off for recycling. They had been accumulating under the back stairs apparently. One by one they got to the state when no more life could be coaxed from them and so, obviously, they were not able to do any more work.

I happen to think there is something rather fine about the way we keep our electrical equipment going for as long as we do. This is because of thrift considerations of course, and also about just taking care of things. Just like we take care of people when they break or are wearing out.

This afternoon I visited an elderly woman. In an attempt to stop her books and many belongings from sliding onto the floor I retrieved an old fashioned address metal holder from the bottom of the pile. It was obviously the cause of the precarious arrangement. Untrapped, it sprang open! ‘Oh, I keep it there because it won’t close any more’. Some things just keep on having a life don’t they, just like this bright lady.

Can we ever do enough to honour and respect the wise ones, who wear out slowly and in the process teach so much?

Here is the offertory sung at the end of the Remembrance Day ceremony :