My husband loves doughnuts. When we were young I used to make doughnuts for our family frequently. He had bought a great cookbook for me, which I still have over a half-century later, and a little hand-held plastic device into which you poured doughnut cake batter and then released a ring of it into hot oil, to produce doughnuts.

He loved that little device because it made perfect doughnuts. I graduated to making yeast doughnuts, both the types that are baked in a ring and those that are perfect rounds that rise, and are later filled with the fillings of your choice; jam, for example.

I've no idea what became of the little plastic doughnut-making device, and I haven't voluntarily made doughnuts for decades. My husband is ever on the lookout for doughnut-making devices, but I steadfastly refuse now to make anything that is deep-fried. Lo and behold, some time ago he read an article in our local newspaper about a neat little electric device that bakes doughnuts without deep-frying them, and they're so good they taste and look like the authentic thing.

He looked the source up online and ordered one of the devices for himself, resolved that he would at last be able to fulfill his craving for doughnuts - and he would be the source of their manufacture, not me. The device arrived, he sat down to read the instructions for use, and I offered to mix up the batter if he would go ahead to produce the doughnuts. A satisfactory arrangement as far as he was concerned, and he's never looked back.

The doughnuts the little machine produces are perfect; they smell divine, taste just as good and pose no health risks due to being saturated with cooking oil. Nice to know we can always find ways out of our little self-imposed dilemmas. We're having doughnuts for dessert tonight, to complement the fresh strawberries.

We did a lot of our out-of-door recreational adventuring with our youngest son, now a biologist, living in British Columbia. With him we had many canoe-camping trips to Algonquin Park, did white-water canoeing in Tennessee, and hiked the Great Smokies, the White Mountain range extensively, and went alpine camping at Long Mountain in B.C. We also did the Bowron Lake circuit with him, then explored old growth forests around Chilliwack.

On our own, we hiked mountain ranges and forests around the main island of Honshu in Japan. As well as the forests and mountains of the Adirondacks. Closer to where we live, Gatineau Park, an invaluable recreational treasure and natural preserve in Canada's National Capital Region, became a second home to us for hiking and canoeing, snowshoeing and seasonal berry-picking for jam-making.

Our days of such physical adventure are pretty well over. We've no longer the stamina that would permit us to hike for hours to attain a mountain peak and look out over the landscape onto legions of other peaks surrounding the one we stood upon, viewing everything around us with reverence and awe.

Our son continues his adventuring and sends us photographs to share with us what he has seen. He has hiked in Italy, Spain, Hawaii, Sweden, Greece, New Zealand and Australia. All of which have been wonderful experiences for him, and which he has shared with us in the form of priceless photographs as mementos. Including those sent yesterday from a week-end camping trip at Tofino.

To some people retirement from the paid workforce seems an entirely new, unpredictable and somehow daunting step to take. Most people do look forward to retirement, but then there are concerns such aswhether there will be enough money to live on through savings or a retirement plan; whether one can keep busy and interested in life; or how it might be possible for a retired couple to live together in continued harmony when they're always together with no workplace to escape to.

On the street we live on, fully one-third of the residents are now retired, no longer with the workforce. Some people spend more time doing volunteer work, others just keep to themselves as they always have; some live alone, some with spouses and children. There have also been marriage dissolutions on this street in numbers that rival those of retirees.

One can only suspect that this is a micro-look at what occurs elsewhere within the middle class, anywhere.

Retired for two years, a neighbour across the street informed us his wife was retiring that very day. And, he said, because he was an only child he was accustomed to solitude, and craved it, and he wondered how he and his wife would 'get along' now that they were both footloose, as it were, right next to one another day by day. Her interests are sewing and gardening, and she now intends to fulfill her ambitions to become more involved in those pursuits, while his are cooking and guitar. Moreover, their three children still live at home, one newly in the professional-status workforce, another completing her Master's, and the third just starting university. They'll manage.

A neighbour up the street, alone for the last dozen years since his wife decided to return alone to her Eastern European roots, leaving him to forge on where he preferred to be, retired several months ago and said he was busier than ever, more involved than ever, in work associated with his ethnic community.

Another neighbour, whose wife got fed up with his philandering, living alone also now, travels twice yearly to various places of the world to relieve the solitude that he'd prefer not to live with. He would prefer to find another life companion, truly missing the presence of his wife, but she is adamant; she will not return to him. In his search for a replacement he has some standards; he is an exuberantly fit man for a retiree, and would prefer a woman whose health and physical standards match his own.

A neighbour down the street has never been the same since his prostate cancer operation followed by a heart-bypass operation, and that's not surprising. But this is a man who had an inordinate zest for life and whose activities as a long-time retiree echoed that, so it's sad to see his social life degenerate as it has; he keeps busy on the Internet.

As for us, retired for fifteen and 13 years respectively; there is no question we are exceedingly fortunate to be comfortably well off due to a good, reliable pension income. And the fact that we are wholly engaged with one another, added to the fact that I had always wanted to live in closer physical communion with my husband, to be together at any time of the day. And that wish has been fulfilled. We can reach out to touch one another at any time, and we do. While each pursuing our own interests, complementarily.

She is a discriminating shopper, a young girl who enjoys new apparel, footwear and jewellery every bit as much as her peers, but whose idea of a shopping expedition is certainly different. Not for her the aimless wandering about a mall in search for elusive perfection or the challenge of selecting by chance items that take her fancy.

Her idea of shopping is to enter a shop, and then exit it as soon as practically possible. She knows, as she enters, what she wants. If she infers that the stock carried by that store does not match closely with her expectations, out she goes. Logical enough. But she takes it one step further, by doing some homework, taking to the Internet to look for clothing items that she knows she will like, noting where they are sold, and then making for that particular shop.

She is on the cusp of fifteen. She has experienced, on occasion, the agony of being in the company of her peers whose idea of fun and entertainment is to file into one shop after another whose inventory is geared to attract teen-age girls. And she detests this ritual.

As her grandmother it took me a little while to realize what her modus operandi consisted of, when I'd go shopping with her.

It's sparing of time and patience, something I have yet to learn, despite the 60 years' gap in our age.

Another in a long string of disproportionate-to-the-season rainy days. We keep breaking all previously-recorded records of rainfalls for these spring months. Yesterday, in a light rain, before it all came tumbling down again, I set about shaping coir inserts for two hanging baskets, filled them with garden soil, peat moss and sheep manure, and planted two wave petunias apiece in them; as they mature they'll fill out and send graceful sprays of fragrant bloom dangling from their perch.

Couldn't resist the beauty of canna lilies, as a gift to one another for our 56th wedding anniversary, coming up next week. Their corms will winter over nicely for planting again in the spring. The hosta that we planted in one of our larger planters four years earlier has overwintered beautifully year after year and this year filled out expeditiously once it was taken out from under its protective winter cover.

The entire garden appears to be doing well; I had to replace a shasta daisy and did lose a rose, a very old one, along with two clematis vines, both of which had started growing nicely, and then, strangely just shrivelled. It's unfortunate to lose dependable old companions that give us such pleasure during the summer months. the clematis vines will be replaced with newer cultivars that may bloom more frequently and perhaps be a little more hardy.

She called my name from a distance, and I had to remove my sunglasses to see just who it was. It's been a few years since we've seen one another, and she has changed, somewhat. But we hugged, glad to see one another again. She and her close extended family co-own a dollar store. It's not a franchise, but rather an ownership arrangement.

Actually she and her husband own the remaining store. They got fed up looking for a replacement for their earlier, very successfully Loonie-Toonie shop. Their lease, after a decade, was not extended because the nearby pharmacy had plans to extend its footprint.

The two stores, Loonie-Toonie and Loonie-Toonie-Two, located a relatively short distance from one another, in two separate plazas, employed the extended family; brothers, sisters-in-law, and nieces and nephews as part-time help. They stock durable, well-made items that were a better quality and more varied than other dollar stores. And we've been shopping there for as long as they've been open, which is about fifteen years now. We usually drop by on a week-end when she isn't working, our interaction being with other family members.

They're a Lebanese-Canadian family, close-knit and gregarious by nature. Unself-consciously kind and quick to greet old customers, personable and personally interested in each and every of their customers whom they treat like valued old friends. They're an established social presence in the community. And a credit to themselves for their enterprise and sociability combined.

We shop there for useful items like pot scrubbers, batteries, and garden supplies like peony cages and coir inserts. We never know what's new in the store, and potentially useful for the kitchen; an inexpensive and pleasant outing, seeing old friends and acquiring new utensils.

We took the opportunity in an otherwise too-busy day, to enjoy our small urban backyard on a windy, sometimes-sunny day, cooler than its predecessors. Our little dogs sniffed and snuffled about, while we sat and contemplated life being brought back to all the growing things in our garden.

The garden pots, freshly filled with potting soil and the begonia corms over-wintered in our basement, are beginning to gently flesh out. The grape hyacinths are in bloom, and the Siberian irises are already putting out their flower heads.

The weeping caragena is full of its tiny, yellow spring flowers which will become pea pods in summer, with tiny seedlings springing up as a result, having to be pulled up lest we have a backyard full of flowering peas. The smaller of our two magnolia trees is in the flush of its floral displays, like the much larger, older one in the front garden. And the apple trees are in full flush, with their pink-white floral display.

A sudden movement alerts us to the presence of a bumble bee among the caragena flowers. And the bee is not the only one taking advantage of the pollen in those tiny yellow blooms, for there too is a hummingbird, resplendent in iridescent green, hovering and sipping and then zipping away.

Is that not perfection?

She has a dream property, right on the edge of the Canadian Shield. A lovely old log home, set on close to 6 acres of woodland and wetland. Built originally as a schoolhouse, it has long since been updated with modern facilities.

Hummingbirds are so familiar with her that they seem to hang on the air over her head doing acrobatics as though in appreciation for the home-made nectar she sets out for them.

All manner of birds, from various types of woodpeckers, orioles, goldfinches, robins, bluejays and cardinals come to her many feeders. She chose that property because it was outside a municipal jurisdiction. And the reason for that, although she still obtains annual licenses for her animals, is that she has chosen to take in an abundance of neglected and abused dogs. And cats. and rabbits. Where else could she then, live?

But it is a long distance from where we live. And, because she is a single mother of a young girl, she calls upon us at times of need. And those times have grown increasingly frequent, of late. She has been without a paying contract, as a trained and experienced professional, for a full year. She lived on her savings for a while, but since then we have been her sole source of income.

Over and above that, whenever things go wrong, something needs to be fixed, we're called. And then her father does things that have to be done, from changing over her ice tires to normal ones on her vehicle, to replacing a set of front-door lock-sets, to anything else that crops up. The long drive exhausts us, the presence of all those animals dispirits us, her sad plight frightens us, because of the depressing toll it takes on her spirits, and ours.

I was in a hurry this morning, thinking far less of the dignity of my sartorial state than the practicality of protecting my tender skin from the vampirish activities of the mosquito population now burgeoning in the ravine. It's a lovely warm, but muggy day, with threat of thunderstorms. I had neglected to remind myself that the lightweight, white pants and jacket I pulled on to venture into the ravine this morning would reveal the garish purple of my underpants.

My husband kindly pointed my lapse in attention to display when we were out on the trail. Too late to remedy, and so I was happy enough that this day we did not come across any others enjoying themselves as we were doing.

And enjoy the scenery we did; the apple trees are now in full bloom, and the hawthorns too have begun their bloom. The pin cherry are dangling their little clusters of florets, and the forest floor is littered with blossoming wild strawberries.

And to our especial delight, joining the display of trilliums and trout lilies, the Jack-in-the-Pulpits have now also begun blooming, entire colonies of them where in previous years none had ever evidenced themselves. A yearly renewal, a delight to behold.

We needed the impetus of a warm, bright sunny day to finally influence us that night-time frosts would no longer occur. And that naturally led to the conclusion we were safe to begin planting annuals to brighten the garden landscape.

Perennials were emerging nicely from the garden beds and borders and the flowering crabs were in full bloom; the magnolias still boasting their fabulous blossoms. This week-end would give us the opportunity. And it did.

The pots we have scattered about our property to give bright jolts of colour and shape to the landscape give us enormous pleasure every summer season, well into late fall. So the planting commenced, with dracaena in the center of some of the pots, and this year also a few hostas for shape and form, surrounded by begonias, wave petunias, lobelia and a variety of plant fillers, many of which will drape gracefully over the garden pots.

At the present time the pots are simply there as nurseries, encouraging the growth of the newly-planted flowering stock. Before long they will become fully crowded with the bounty of beautifully colourful flowers and foliage, barely resembling in exuberant abundance their current look of meek modesty.

The weather, a huge topic of casual conversation in the Ottawa Valley, is exceedingly variable and changeable. A few days earlier we had incessant, day after day rain events, which gradually subsided, leaving us with heavily overcast skies, cool-to-chill temperatures, and occasional cloudbursts.

Now, we're in a system that is dry yet humid, if one can imagine that, which gave us a series of resounding thunderstorms last night. Today, the skies have cleared, the sun is brilliant and it's heading toward a hot day.

All the rain, leading to standing pools of water in the forested ravine adjacent our home has welcomed the mosquito season. They're there with a vengeance, large, black and hungry for our tender flesh to withdraw their daily quotient of blood. We give a sympathetic thought to the wildlife who cannot escape the predations of the mosquitoes as we do, when we exit the ravine.

Finally, the relentless rain has come to an end. For the time being. This has been an extraordinary rainy season, this spring, breaking all previous records in April, and now for May. Our gardening has been put back, although the gardens themselves, the perennials and the ornamental trees haven't seemed to mind that much, though they too have been late.

The garden pots have been brought out of storage and placed where deemed aesthetically appropriate for another gardening season. They are to be filled with the usual mixture of aged sheep manure, peat moss and bagged garden soil. Bone meal will be added when I begin filling them with the flowers and ornamental fillers.

And to begin that process we hauled ourselves off to the local nursery that we favour for their splendid begonias. Those begonia corms that I usually save to overwinter in our basement have already begun sprouting, and they are destined for planting in the backyard garden pots and beds, while those we bought fresh will be used for the front gardens and garden pots.

In Ottawa, traditionally the May 24th long week-end signals that it's usually safe from night-time frosts, to venture into serious planting for annuals. And that is precisely what we plan for this week-end.

Time for our little poodle's annual check-up and booster shot. A visit to the veterinarian used to upset her dreadfully. She was anything but confident or complacent, sitting there, waiting with us for that yearly inspection of her health condition. Even now, though she has mellowed with age, she trembled visibly. Holding her helps, it is reassuring to her.

The medical examination, brief enough, although the period of time we spend talking about her with the vet, disclosed the usual. That, despite her agedness she remains in good health. Heart, lungs, kidneys all fine. She was due for a rabies shot. She still has some hearing and some eyesight capabilities, although very much muted. But then, the veterinarian who looks after her hasn't very many patients her age.

It was eighteen years ago that he began practising at his brother's clinic. His brother is now retired, he himself now heads the clinic, and one of his original patients is still around and doing very well.

She still goes along with us on a daily hour, hour-and-a-half walk, brisk at times, uphill and downhill in our nearby ravine. She eats heartily, and sleeps well. She's a champion. She has memory lapses and bouts of confusion and that is painful to observe. But we manage, we and she, to negotiate these episodes and enjoy one another.

From the time of our earliest companionship when we were in our early teen-age years, we were both bibliophiles, attracted to books, reading them omnivorously. A "date" would comprise a trip to the local library together where we were free to pursue our individual reading interests. Our love of books has only increased over the years. And we have amassed a collection of books, both those we have read and cannot bear to part with, and those we intend to read.

We had put together bags of clothing items meant to be recycled through the Salvation Army thrift shop, as part of our annual clothing change-over from winter apparel to warm-weather clothing. Dropping them off there gave us the opportunity to meander over to the used-book section. This is where we also pick up films, and we scooped up a video of "Ran", which, though we've seen it several times, bears retaining for the excellent entertainment value and historical documentation it represents.

While he gathered a substantial number of the kinds of reading material he favours, I came away with a number of books more suited to my tastes, including a tome featuring "Religions of the World"; obviously a textbook published twenty years ago, but fully comprised of what I consider to be extremely useful information.

I also obtained mint condition novels by Rohinton Mistry, Jane Urquhart and Margaret Atwood; never know what's available until you look - and pounce!

Presumably the boxer had retained a residual memory of the pain and misery he had experienced so recently with his head full of porcupine quills. Just as well for him the veterinarian was skilled in removing them; it's likely that all country vets have had more than sufficient experience removing quills from overly-inquisitive dogs.

This time she had some advance notice; the dogs did not rush toward the porcupine, they raised a howl at its presence. Not far from the house, in fact close to the tree line behind which lies herwetland. She approached the animal with caution, quickly observed that it was terrified of the presence of the dogs, and called them away, clearing them expeditiously from the immediate vicinity.

Poor thing; it was obviously a juvenile. Small, fearful, anxious for its safety in the too-near presence of all those other, threatening animals. She felt badly for the creature, although two weeks ago she had just felt rage that her favourite dog was in pain and would only allow her to remove two of the quills before it went berserk and she had to forcibly quiet it down, and take it over to the vet.

It didn't look inclined to move. She couldn't, she told herself, afford to have it hang around. Dangerous for the porky and dangerous for her dogs. So she sliced up an apple, got one of the small cages, and prodded the fearful creature into the cage. She called her daughter to come out and have a look at the pitiable thing that had caused them so much grief. Her daughter was upset, said her mother should just have left the poor little thing alone.

She spoke quietly, gently to the porcupine, wondering where its parents were; just abandoned their youngster did they, she thought? So it had to fend for itself. Had neglected to teach their offspring cautionary tactics, to make itself scarce in the face of potential danger?

They got in the car with the caged porcupine, drove a few miles away, closer to non-human-habitable areas of more frequent wetlands interspersed with denser forest, and stopped the car. Out came the cage, and they carried it some distance from the road, through the bracken.

Opening the door of the cage, they both spoke words of encouragement to the cowering animal. Until it finally amassed sufficient courage to waddle out of the cage and slowly increase the distance between them and itself.

From the time I was a young girl in my teens I yearned for the close company of a boy who would value our relationship, a special one that only we together would share. I met that boy when we were both fourteen. That special relationship speedily developed. It has matured considerably since then, almost 60 years later. We have shared our lives together.

She too seems to need the constant companionship of a man. She is now 50. Over the years she has shared many companionships. None of which turned out to represent what she needed. These were sometimes-brief, sometimes lengthy alliances, ranging from months to twenty years of shared experiences, and all failed. She still yearns for what she has never quite managed to achieve; a lasting, mutually-beneficial tandem of committed love.

Each time one of her alliances fails and she parts from the disappointment of her emotional aspirations she tells herself that she is doomed to go through life without having ever experienced the kind of relationship she yearns toward. She descends into an abyss of dejected failure; bleak, black moods of despair.

And then suddenly there appears someone who expresses a deep interest in her and she responds, thankfully. Pitting all her hopes once again in the potential of achieving the good fortune of finding someone who will share her desires, her values, her needs and priorities.

When the rain finally stopped this morning we hastened to get ourselves out to our nearby ravine for a morning walk. We missed getting out yesterday, there was simply no opportunity as the rain was incessant and driving. There were a few others out on the trails with their dogs, catching the opportunity before the return of rain.

Despite the low cloud ceiling we could feel the sun trying to get through. It's unlikely it will succeed today; Environment Canada has warned of rain and more rain for the next five to seven days. It's a nuisance, but on the other hand, this is spring and if it doesn't rain in this season we're in trouble. It does also translate into our being late this year planting our garden pots and flower beds, but we'll get around to all of that.

Usually the safest time to embark on that annual ritual in any event, is the May 24th long week-end, so we're on track there, though it's always been our habit to plant earlier, to get a jump on our season of growing things. Short enough as it is in this geographic area.

It's more than a little sobering, thinking of rain and how vulnerable some human settlements are with respect to receiving uncommonly excessive amounts of rain. Those facing their homes and fields and growing crops being flooded by the rising Assiniboine River and its tributaries in Manitoba, and in the United States, the Mississippi inexorably flooding its banks, particularly in Louisiana.

All that drenching rain and wind we received yesterday has resulted in a snowstorm of drifting serviceberry blossoms today. And the ash trees too in the ravine have shed their florets. The lack of sun has the trout lilies shut tight their yellow flower heads, but the trilliums don't mind the sun's absence, nor do the woodland violets; they're abloom in tiny perfect heads of mauve, purple and yellow.

A special treat this morning was the unmistakable querying call of a Great Grey owl, deep in the hollow of the ravine. If we're fortunate we'll have the opportunity to see it on another occasion; often enough the crows make a racket when an owl's about and following the audible clues we can sometimes catch sight of the imperturbable owl surrounded by hysterical crows.

Finally, the weather co-operated and we saw our opportunity to groom our old girl. In all her eighteen and a half years she has never been professionally groomed. We have always preferred to do this ourselves, rather than farm her out to a professional groomer, finding a brush and several sizes of sharp scissors would do the job nicely.

Trouble was, the older she became, the less amenable she became to being handled. As she approached her eighteenth birthday she was more and more reluctant to submit to the process. She had never been happy about having her paws tidied up, much less her muzzle. She is not a pure-bred, sharing genes from a Poodle and a Pomeranian parent. But a Poodle's hair has a tendency to grow and she has always been a healthy dog, and her hair always grows quickly. Her neat and tidy appearance quickly receded as her hair grew progressively longer and then she would look so unkempt we really had to take remediation steps.

The older she got the more upset she became about the process. She would struggle against the indignity of being held in place, of a pair of scissors being wielded for the purpose of shedding her masses of hair to make her look more presentable. In fact, once the procedure was done with, it was clear she felt more comfortable with her hair less prone to obtruding where it was not wanted; over her eyes, around her muzzle into her mouth. Best of all, because she is a water dog, she enjoyed her baths. Less so, however, as she became older.

And it was imperative to dry her as quickly as possible and keep her warm during the drying process. We finally had a warm spring day with ample sunshine so she could be held, wrapped in a towel at first, outside, with the sun warming her until drying was complete. She was content with the outcome, and so were we.

I dread those telephone calls. But they are inevitable. Who else does she have to share her problems with other than her mother? Friends come and go, but mothers are always there, ready to listen, to sympathize, to offer a voice of comfort.

She is a single mother. She has surrounded herself on her rural property, lovely as it is, with quite an assortment of dependents. She takes in abused animals to provide them with some relief from an animal-unfriendly world. And she fosters rescue dogs, restoring some semblance of behavioural balance to them so they can be adopted by people willing to give them another opportunity at normalcy in a companion-pet-to-person relationship. All of this emotionally draining, time-consuming, energy-demanding - and costly, but to her compelling. Her way, she says, to 'give something back'. It constrains her lifestyle to living in a country setting with all the difficulties of that situation for a single woman with an emerging-adult child.

When she called early yesterday morning I was just preparing to leave for a relatively nearby medical building for a scheduled fasting blood-cholesterol test. After speaking with her, trying to calm her down from her agitated and fearful state, I felt myself agitated and upset. One of her dogs, one of the most difficult of the pack to deal with requiring specialized and single-focus attention because of the dreadful physical abuse it had suffered had an encounter with a porcupine. She had tried to remove the quills but there were too many, too embedded, and the dog, a boxer, was in much pain, and difficult to control, certainly for one person.

She had to take it into the nearest-located veterinarian to have it looked after. A prospect that was daunting to her given that she is without employment and must carefully decide where her scant resources will be placed - but this was an emergency.

In the end, the day proceeded as it must do. I got through the inconvenience of the blood withdrawal and got on with my day. And she retrieved her dog from the veterinarian who, being in a rural practise, sees multiple such incidents on a regular basis, and who sympathetically charged my daughter a modest fee, just over $100, having had to anaesthetize the boxer and probe for well entrenched quills on its snout, lips, muzzle.

First thing after breakfast he took the lawn mower he had purchased the day before as a Mother's Day gift for our daughter back to the place where he'd bought it. It was speedily replaced with a new one with the advice that he try it out immediately to ensure it had no mechanical problems before re-presenting it to our daughter. And he did just that; filled it with gas, with oil, and cut a few swaths in our front lawn which needs mowing, in any event. Works fine.

Sure, we don't believe in the social convention of observing a commercial holiday, but in this instance our daughter who is the sole breadwinner in her single-parent home does need some additional support, and the mower we'd bought her six years ago has had some rough treatment since, given the size of her rural property, and it is frustrating for her to grapple with its idiosyncrasies, so we thought a new one might help her manage better. Besides which, she needs some cheering up, since she's been without a paying contract for a year, and we've all been strained to help her meet her financial obligations.

And that's when he set about to finally change the tires in his own car, at home, after having done the same for our daughter the day before. Taking the ice tires off the car and replacing them with ordinary tires until next winter when the weather we receive in this area makes it a wise decision to prevent potential accidents by taking this weather-climate-sensitive step.

Tiring work for a 74-year-old, but he's in good shape, thank heavens. And he mentioned later that although he felt somewhat tired after dinner he could identify a difference in his physical strength in handling the wheels, as a result of the regular weight-lifting protocol he has embarked upon since December of last year.

We have never subscribed to the social convention of observing special public holidays of the kind that celebrate Mother's Day. Our way of thinking is that love, support and appreciation is an ongoing lifestyle, not to be given special recognition on one day set aside on the calendar, but practised as a deeply ingrained personal conviction constantly.

So while others celebrate such days, assiduously recalling their social/familial obligations to those who gave them birth and emotional well-being we go about our own quiet daily celebrations of life. On the other hand, we reserve that right for ourselves, certainly not extending it to others.

Most people don't look on these annual recognition days as purely commercial ventures advocated by commercial interests who do their utmost to advertise products certain to please the recipient. From floral offerings and extravagant cards commemorating our recognition of the specialness of motherhood and all that it entails, to expensive jewellery and trips abroad in honour of Mother.

Our daughter is a single mother of a teen-age girl. She has no one to congratulate her on having become a mother with all the burdens and concerns associated with that responsibility. To her, although she shares in large part, our thoughts on the commercial public-social holiday, we do extend an effort. We made the drive to her home from ours of 100 kilometres distance for the afternoon and her father changed the spark plug in her gas lawn mower that was balking, then set about taking the winter snow tires off her vehicle and replacing them with ordinary wheels and tires.

Our recognition of her need at this time to have a bit of extended family about her. Although the skies were heavily overcast the drive was pleasant enough; the roiling, swelling water at the cascades at Pakenham under the five-span bridge always an interesting sight.

She really, really, REALLY wanted her very own trampoline for her tenth birthday. We had our doubts, but her mother said she would be fine with it. So we chose one that seemed the right size, that had the protective net around it, brought it over, and she and her mother set it up, afterward.

It had a lot of use for the first few years. She and her girlfriends thought it was great fun, and became quite adept at its use.

It's almost five years later. She put it together for the first time today on her own, after taking the parts out of storage. The net, she decided, was no longer useful. It irritated her, and she would no longer use it. Her mother agreed, that if she were careful - which this young girl always is, more or less - she could use it without the net. I watched her assemble the rest of it, over the frame. The net discarded.

When she told her best friend, she groaned, and said to our granddaughter that she was herself convinced that the net had, in the past, saved her from some serious injury. A surprisingly sensible comment. But one that our granddaughter just waved off as irrelevant. Her best friend, as it happens, who lives fairly close on another rural property, is a tom-boyish type of acrobatic adventurer. Our granddaughter is not.

Just as well that at age 15 year interest in the use of the trampoline will not outlast the next two weeks by which time its renewed novelty will no longer beckon, but very swiftly fade into boredom.

On a subtle enough scale it is a mysterious process, although I do not, rationally, subscribe to the possibilities of the metaphysical, how else to describe what occurs on occasion than a whiff of precognition? It is a thought best kept to myself, I know.

Yet, on occasion, I am struck by the peculiar coincidence of thinking of an individual with whom I have had scant recent contact, or of an incident and the next thing I know I hear from that person, or an incident occurs closely paralleling what I'd thought of.

So it was earlier this week when I suddenly received an email from an old friend I'd last seen in my home five years earlier when she had arrived in town unexpectedly on a trip. She would be arriving on the 1st, staying to the 9th, for a course; might we be interested in meeting, having dinner together? She had already been in contact with another mutual friend, one whom we hadn't seen for about fifteen years and she too was interested in getting together.

They arrived right on the dot of six, just as promised, and just as dinner was nicely browning in the oven. The delight at seeing them both, kept both of us busy hugging and exclaiming over the pleasure of receiving them again in our home. They're each twenty years our junior, we'd been colleagues in the distant past when we were their age and they still younger. Each proffered to us as they entered our home, identical paper bags holding almost-identical bottles of wine.

Earlier I had baked cheese croissants, a raspberry-topped cheesecake for dessert, prepared chicken soup and rice, had a potato casserole in the oven, and chicken breasts baked with mushrooms, and roasted cauliflower ready to come out and be served. There was a lot of excited talk that passed between us for hours last night, and it was late by the time they left. We now know in some detail how each of them have fared over the intervening years.

Sometimes one's own problems shrink in significance to those that other people face, without, obviously, your being aware of them. It is a healthy experience to keep in touch with old friends, a valuable, emotional support for everyone - one never to be taken lightly.

In expectation of a fine week-end, far removed from the kind of cold, wet weather we've been experiencing of late, necessitating rain-weather clothing on the warm end of the spectrum, my husband decided yesterday afternoon despite the cold, damp and wind, to get to work emptying the garden shed of summer-time furniture.

First off was the installation of the large canopy over the steel frame standing on our deck. That gives us shelter from light rain and from the heat of the sun during the dog days of summer. And there's a measure of privacy afforded by the canopy with its side panels of mesh, the back one comprised of a heavy plastic sheet that hinders rain from insinuating itself into the confines of the partially-covered deck.

The two-seater glider, with its cushions in place comprises my favourite place to sit and read the newspapers, with our little dogs. The lounge and the barbecue are my husband's affairs. After a long, extremely cold, challenging winter this is the leisure out-of-doors experience we look forward to with great anticipation.

The gardens below, in the backyard, provide ample opportunity for practising the aesthetics and deeply-ingrained pleasures involved in dabbling in the soil - providing us with another kind of gratification. In all, a formula for appreciating all that we have the good fortune to enjoy.

Looking at the positive side of this damp, inclement, cold weather, since there's little incentive or opportunity to get out into the garden to begin preparing for summer, at least I had the opportunity to do the spring cleaning without the usual resentment that I was wasting time indoors when the outdoors beckoned.

I was able to complete cleaning out kitchen and bathroom cupboards, and to clean the windows and window screens, and wash the sheer draperies. Makes me feel good to get all that done and over with, and now it is done and over with. The dining room windows with their stained glass shutters make for a little more work, but they're a source of cheerful colour in any season, apart from the pleasure we get looking out onto the front gardens from the dining room.

Things did go a little awry when I began hanging the newly-washed sheers back on the track, as the small eyes that the hooks fit into began to break, just as I managed to fit the hooks into them. Some of the hooks are old and made of metal, but most are newer, formed of a flexible nylon, and since they're a few years old they've become denatured and brittle, susceptible to breaking off. Which means they require replacement.

So a trip to the drapery supply shop has been necessitated and that was rather unexpected. But better weather lies ahead on the summer horizon, and the gardens await my ministrations. Patience, that virtue that seems forever in short supply, is demanded.

Spring of 2011 has been an absolute and literal wash-out. Rain, rain and emphatically more rain. In the Ottawa Valley, Environment Canada advises that this past April was the rainiest ever on record. And now that we're into May the rain, incessant, overwhelmingly omnipresent, appears to be determined to break all previous rain records maintained for the month of May.

It seemed just a few days earlier before the onset of more rain events to top off what we'd already encountered, that the trails in the ravine close to our house might finally begin to dry, and the thick muck decline. On our hour-long perambulation in there this morning, all the advances in the drying-out process had been reversed, and the trails remain deep in thick, wet, slippery clay. A handful of trilliums are bravely advancing toward bloom, but early-blooming Serviceberry trees and Honeysuckle bushes are also late this year.

Ottawa's long-time spring festival, set to open May 6, will not be quite as billed; what is a Tulip Festival after all, without tulips? They are not yet in bloom and not about to bloom anytime soon. They've been retarded in their maturation thanks to the cold, wet and lack of sunlight.

Our own garden a case in point. We have, in our backyard, a micro climate, and even there it is obvious that what normally begins to poke above ground and fuzz our ornamental trees has been delayed this year. There are nudgings here and there, but nothing even remotely resembling the glory that had already overtaken us at this time last year. Our magnificent Magnolia tree last year had long been in sumptuous bloom by this time. Not this year; the magenta buds are still uncertain whether they are permitted to evidence themselves, given the prevailing atmosphere.

Nothing to really complain about since the weather, although not quite typical, is also not catastrophic. Quite unlike weather conditions elsewhere in the world, with the onset of tornadoes and flooding. Just a trifling disappointment which we hope summer will make up for. But that's just the thing of it; here in this northern clime our summers are too short as it is; spring awakening is doubly important to people who brave it through extreme weather conditions throughout the winter months.

We waited until 11:00 p.m. to put on the television, last night, to view results of the 2011 federal election. To discover news that pleased us. We were hoping that this would occur, although it seemed, through poll results nearing the end of the election campaign that there might be complications to our expectations.

There were, but under the circumstances, nothing that cannot be at least partially ameliorated by the willingness of at least one party leader to handle too-unreasonable demands by the other, and to accept those demands which seem desirable and feasible to implement for the greater good of the Canadian social contract.

Generally speaking, the voting public worked its way well enough through the maze of electoral promises and the haze of direly-warned implications to come to their own conclusions; not quite as suggestible as many might have believed. With the exception of the mass of Quebec voters who moved on their ballots like lemmings tossing themselves over the proverbial cliff.

One positive result was the near-annihilation of the Bloc Quebecois when Quebecers voted massively for the NDP, whose leader promised them all that the Bloc had represented to them, in the process taking out an excellent Conservative cabinet minister in favour of someone who had decided only in the last two weeks to contest the seat for the NDP.

The other result, far more negative and perhaps in retrospect inevitable, was the abject poverty of seats left to the once-great Liberal Party, resulting in a speech by its leader, Michael Ignatieff, that revealed his excellent ability to communicate as a leader and a passionate patriot, concluding with his resignation a day later, with the loss of his own seat as a Member of Parliament.

Enough voters across the country were in favour of continuity and stability based on a solidly reliable performance record to grant the Conservative Party of Canada and Prime Minister Stephen Harper a full majority government enabling him now to move forward with confidence in pursuit of policies and initiatives that will continue to benefit the country.

His gait is somewhat different from most squirrels. His tail has been severely truncated; in fact it's absent. In its stead a long growth of fur resembling a bit of a tail takes its place, but the tail not there at all. When he first came to our attention, three years ago, he hadn't even those long bits of hair.

When he scampers away, backside to us, he looks more like a rabbit than a squirrel. He befriended us because it was in his existential interest to do so, we assume. We were not aware of his existence before he first confronted us; he actually did, raced toward us and then stopped just before us, mere feet away, and waited. Even though our two little dogs, themselves a little larger than he is, were with us. I just automatically reached into the bag I always carry with me, and threw a peanut directly to him. He leaped toward it with the alacrity that only a squirrel can demonstrate, to possess it and triumphantly race off with his treasure.

We named him Stumpy and began to look out for him. And it was clear he was looking out for us, as well. He behaved quite unlike the other squirrels who couldn't seem to make the connection between us and the peanuts left behind, though some did, however warily. They would never allow us to get too close to them; our proximity alarmed them, but not so Stumpy.

It is sad to see another young family breaking apart. Suddenly, a For Sale sign on the front lawn. Surprising all the neighbours, hardly expecting to see yet another house on this street go up for sale. Dividing the family assets. It cannot have been more than eight years since they moved in. At that time there was only one child; two more followed, a family of three young children.

If there was ever someone of whom it could be said he represented a perfectly doting father, capable of doing everything emotional and practical for his children that their mother did, it would be this father. And he was also that rarity, a uxorious man, proud of and devoted to his wife.

He, relaxed of temperament, a smiling glad-hander, and she with obvious ambition to succeed, and the energy and enterprise to make it happen. A good fit, one might hazard a guess, since both are extroverts. But not really, it would appear, since his lack of ambition to succeed in the job market simply did not match hers.

He worked for a car-leasing agency, and it's seen a downturn of late. She worked diligently as a mother and homemaker, taking on additional paid tasks, offering after-school day-care to other peoples' children and becoming adept at, and teaching other young mothers the ins-and-outs of scrap-booking. From her they would get their handicraft supplies and learn the aesthetics of presentation of family 'mementos'.

It's a micro-tragedy that the marriage has collapsed, and the children left confused and having to adapt to loving and depending upon their parents in separate circumstances rather than the emotionally-bonding union they've always known and derived comfort from.