Having spent three months helping my uncle Woody Burns get back on his feet after a fall that broke his hip, I couldn’t be sure how we’d find him this weekend after our 5-month absence. In fact, he is doing better than ever. Prior to his hip-breaking fall, my uncle had been on a heavy dose of pain medication for a back injury that ultimately required extensive surgery, creating more pain than it alleviated. While he now uses a walker for getting around, he is more sure-footed today than I had seen him in the previous years, which in part I attribute to being off the pain meds. The intervening five months were too long a break in our otherwise regular visits that my great aunt and uncle had become accustomed to expecting every 60 to 90 days – we’ll return with my mother-in-law in tow in early June.