ADULT FAMILY CAREGIVERS BALANCE THEIR AGING PARENTS' WELFARE AND THEIR OWN PEACE OF MIND.

Wanda Heise wheeled the man she still calls Daddy into the living room.

Walter Lehman hadn’t spoken in days. Normally outgoing, the 93-year-old had been silent since hip-replacement surgery and the move from assisted living to hospital-like nursing care this fall.

A Messiah Village staffer was playing hymns on a keyboard — songs that Heise’s father, a former pastor and carpenter, knew well. “What a Friend We have in Jesus.” “When We All Get to Heaven.”

And Lehman started singing along.

“I just couldn’t sing, because he was singing,” says Heise now. “That was a moment.”

These days, all it takes is spitting into a cup to unlock centuries of family history, connecting you to a hamlet in the Scottish Highlands, a castle nestled in Burgundy vineyards or a village of mud huts in Kenya.

Or, as Dr. Henry Louis Gates Jr. discovered when he underwent genetic testing and researched his ancestry, you can find out you're the "descendant of a white woman who slept with one of her slaves."

Entering the Roosevelt Tavern in York, and I don’t mean this in a bad way, is like taking a short walk back in time. From the coat-check window to the Currier & Ives–like American art to the crystal dessert cups filled with lemon wedges sitting on the tables, the feel is one of dinners past — not that there’s anything wrong with that.

But the tavern, on North Penn Street several blocks off the main drag, is not, or was not on my recent visit, like its former self when it was known as Archie’s Inn Towne.

Nearly everyone’s jumping on the healthy-eating bandwagon: It’s now common knowledge that eating well — especially as we get older — can not only make you feel good, but also actually make your body work better. Still, getting older can provide some challenges when it comes to eating right: Metabolisms can decline, and nutrients don’t absorb quite as easily, making it more difficult to get all the vitamins the body needs.

This month we mark our winter-weariness by grasping at anything that offers so much as the illusion of hope for spring, even a burrowing rodent. We know that Groundhog Day is not a scientific exercise. Yet, among otherwise rational people, there will inevitably be discussions of what “the groundhog” ostensibly did, often accompanied by a bright tone of voice or a heavy sigh, as if the official verdict actually meant something. And when we say “the groundhog,” Octorara Orphie notwithstanding, most of us mean Punxsutawney Phil.

The red-tailed hawk on the telephone pole beside the road looks at me like I’ve done something wrong. His posture is perfect, his gaze impenetrable. I’ve seen lots of hawks this winter, about five in as many days: Their massive bodies perch on telephone wires and exit signs, thick as a child’s thumbprints on a paper sky. I know that they are getting hungry as winter wears on toward spring, and moving closer to the tangle of highways because speeding vehicles scare up the bodies of their prey.