This collection explores many subjects that demand looking after - family, artistic achievements including literature, the natural world, memories, history, and others that call for tending to. It also focuses on the complexities of this engagement - when easy, when difficult, when the subjects are shaded by emotion or the effects of time. Then too there is the looking after, as in afterwards, the reflection on things gone by. These poems cover a broad range - small personal experiences to the grander occasions of life, and the memories of life. They explore the multi-faceted subject of alert custodianship - the necessity of paying daily attention, while at the same time tending to the past already lived.