I'm not quite old enough to have lost any close friends yet, only family members. I also live at some distance from family, so some of my touchstones that are around me or that I make use of every day serve as warm connections to the living.

I have my grandfather's wheel barrow. He loved tending his garden and his fruit trees, and was a careful and frugal man, tending to his gardening tools so they would last with the same care he took with plants and the soil. As I push it across the yard with a load of mulch or topsoil, I hear him admonish me to oil the axle to stop that awful squeak, and feel his approval at the way I tend the soil. (or at least used to. I haven't had time to do much gardening the last 2 -3 years.) Because I haven't taken care of it the way he did, I can almost count the years he used it from the layers and colors of paint that have gradually chipped away over the 16 years I have used it.   My grandmother's rolling pin, the steel box grater my mother received at a bridal shower in 1947. (Mom, fortunately, is still with us.) The little gold hoop earrings that belonged to my late sister.