On Friday we said goodbye to our friend Bill Smith. He was a founding Touchstone board member and served as chair for some of the 16 years he and his wife Lorna served on the board. But the goodbyes happened incrementally over the last decade as he was afflicted with dementia – his accumulated education, experience and wisdom became lost to us in the fog.

The warm Moncton-based voice said hesitantly, “If you have multiple devices, screens and phones and are working from home….” I laughed and listed our many technology addictions and she suggested that the higher speed modem would be recommended - and at no extra cost as we renegotiated our cable/internet account last week.

The other morning, I read through the newspapers quite quickly because I don’t spend much time on the page after page of commentary and news about how we are coping or not with the spread of the virus. I had to hunt for international news, and one article in The Guardian on Friday had me grieving.

Armed with a Swiffer and cloths I started dusting down the ceiling and walls of our mud room the other day. There was residual dust from some renovation work and traffic through the mud room by the renovators. It’s a cloakroom, boot room, pantry and first place to drop things when we come in from the garage.

How many letters in the Greek alphabet will we deal with this year? Hopefully, Pi, Rho, Sigma, Tau, Upsilon, Phi, Chi, Psi, and Omega won’t be needed for our naming pleasure as we launch a new year. Do we put happy, trepidatious, anxious, hopeful, confident, confused, angry, or some variation or combination of all of them in front of ….. New Year as we greet one another?