Apart from all the other things he does, he has been engaging himself in a protocol of weight-lifting regularly for the past several years. He installed a few items downstairs in the basement area, a large room that he finished in this house about fifteen years ago, that we call his studio. It is there also that he does oil painting, although not as much of that in the last years as formerly, when he retired from the paid workforce.

This is the fourth house we have owned and lived in over our 58 years of marriage. The first was a modest little semi-attached bungalow where our three children were born. After that, when the oldest was ten we moved directly into north Toronto from Richmond Hill to a newly-built house whose design we really enjoyed, a two-story house attached through the garage to its neighbour. An employment move took us to Ottawa only two years later, when we moved into a single, detached two-story house. Each of these houses were given my husband's indelible and very individualistic signature. Soon after moving into each he finished the basements to extend them into additional living spaces for our family, and each was vastly different from the last.

In this, our last house where we have lived for the past 22 years, though our children are all long-ago out on their own and fully independent of us, since the oldest is now 52, the youngest approaching 50
we are living in the largest of our four houses. This has been a house constantly undergoing alteration from the original which itself was a design that utterly captivated us for its presence and its potential. In it we have placed a half-century-worth of collecting objects of beauty that have given us great pleasure over the years.

And in it my husband has given free vent to his carpentry, wood-working, stained-glass, ceramic/marble/strip-flooring capabilities and decorative passions, both inside and out, making this house an ongoing exercise in imaginative decor. Apart, of course, from the constant physical upkeep required for any house as it grows older, settles, and parts and areas require ameliorative attention.

He has created and he has retro-fitted and he has transformed this home of ours into a reflection of the type of interior and exterior that is classic, and that he most admires. And we have been immensely privileged to be able to do all of these things. How much longer, at his age, he will be able to continue his transformative efforts at interior decor is another story altogether.

Though halfway to 77 years of age he has once again assembled the two industrial-grade steel-and-wood scaffolds that he had the foresight to buy when we first took possession of this house with its two-story-height rooms. They sit now, one atop the other to enable him to indulge in yet another bit of fanciful work that he has undertaken. He had seen very large rectangular ceramic tiles made in Spain and entirely resembling narrow multi-layered and multi-hued bricks. And decided to apply them to the fireplace wall in our family room.