She is so petite that at 5' tall myself I stand taller than her. She has naturally curly blazing red hair, and an ever-present smile. She and her husband live down at the foot of our street, in a house backing on the ravine, the opposite side of the street to ours. When we first met her about twenty years ago she had a friendly female red retriever she always walked in the ravine. Two years later she acquired another retriever, this time a male and he was extremely large for his breed; the personalities of the two dogs couldn't have been further apart; the female sedate and biddable, the male rambunctious, his physical antics belabouring the patience of his companion dog. His name was Winston, the female's was Autumn.

They're both long gone. And our long-time acquaintance has never replaced them, though she often offers to take her sister's and sister-in-law's and neighbours' dogs out with her in the ravine.When we do see her now, far less frequently, striding through the ravine, a walking stick in each hand, dogs gambolling about as we did yesterday, she is with her sister. Our friend Gayle is a dental technician by profession, her sister, older than her, and absent red hair, is a dentist with a nearby practise within a purpose-built building she'd had constructed some years back. They don't want for the comfort of a sturdy income, she and her partner in marriage and in business, another dentist. They had with them four dogs yesterday and it was pleasurable to witness the delight the dogs took in their trek through the ravine on that cold, overcast day.

Gayle's two sons, whom we vaguely knew as pre-teens are now adults themselves, with their own families. She is still the same open-faced, garrulous woman with a pretty face that we had known many years ago, but her body has quite ballooned to unhealthy proportions. One of the reasons she and her sister remain committed to outdoor exercise. When we come across one another, usually my husband engages her sister since they're both interested in exchanging political views. I generally get to talk with Gayle, and in the process become quite annoyed at the length of time that transpires in the cold, discussing rather vacuously Gayle's worldview of economics, while my husband remains in animated conversation with her sister.

Our conversations are mutually genial and respectful. But yesterday I found the respect I'd always held Gayle in plummeting as she regaled me with the knowledge her husband, a UPS delivery driver, gifted her with. Primarily that the Canadian market is such a limited one for profit compared to the vast American market. That came out of our conversation about Black Friday shopping, about Gayle mentioning their recent return from Florida and the satisfying shopping experience they shared there, with consumer items so much more reasonable than it is here.

With firm conviction she spoke of the statistics that her husband imbued her with; that a number of American cities each have within their geographic confines populations the equal of all of Canada. Gayle, I said to her, the most populous state, California, has a population just about equal to all of Canada; there is no city that fits that population category. Wrong, she responded; I should check my facts; for example, she insisted, New York City, Chicago -- and I don't now recall the other cities she mentioned -- all each have populations of 30-million, while Toronto, Canada's largest city has a population of only 7-million. I looked at her a little goggle-eyed, asking if she was serious.

Toronto, I told her, has no such population figure, and nor do New York or Chicago; check Google, I offered her. She laughed disparagingly, poked me good-naturedly in the shoulder, and said, her husband should know, after all, it's his business as a driver for UPS, one of the largest conglomerates in the world. I'm the one who should check the facts. Nothing ill-natured in her about this exchange of data and opinions, just a solid assurance that she was in possession of the real facts and I was suffering from ignorant lack of awareness, poor thing.

Why should I care? Why should that encounter have left me almost as gloomy as the overcast skies?

He is so irresistibly attracted to the aesthetic of appearance that his mind never stops working on improving, enhancing, aestheticizing our intimate home environment. Some of the projects he takes on move me close to serious heart palpitations. There are times I wish he would focus less on undertaking seriously difficult projects and just relax and enjoy life as it is.

The difficulty with that of course, is that he enjoys those challenges requiring physical strength, endurance and dexterity, and the ability to figure out how to do the electrical work, the plumbing work, the sheer physical effort involved in some of his projects that make so much more extra work than merely applying himself to the endless tasks of home maintenance, that his life quality would be diminished if he just 'sat back', a surrender to lethargy and disinterest that doesn't describe his personality.

So when he mentioned to me several weeks ago that he thought it would be a good idea to replace the pedestal sink he had installed many years ago to replace the pedestrian laundry sink that stood in our laundry room with a sink-vanity, I objected. My objection was that the pedestal sink was perfectly serviceable apart from being attractive itself, and there was no need to replace it. His rejoinder was that he disliked the revealed plumbing behind the pedestal, and that I could use the extra cupboard space to store laundry items. Rather overlooking the bank of cupboards above the sink and washer-dryer. I demurred, he fell silent. As is his wont.

Yesterday when he dropped me off in front of the supermarket where I do my weekly grocery shopping, he began to pull away before I had the chance to retrieve the shopping baskets from the car trunk. While I banged hurriedly on the trunk to remind him, another sharp-eyed shopper wagged his finger admonishingly at my husband, as he curtailed his forgetfulness. That shopper stopped me in the store vestibule as we both secured shopping buggies to tell me that he was an extremely well preserved 86, and knew all about such things as minds wandering elsewhere, and how his intention was to prevent my husband from incurring my wrath; familiar as he was with his own wife's umbrage at such incidents. Married 57 years, he said proudly, so I shouldn't have told him that we've been married almost 60 years. But he was affable and unconcerned and just wanted to have a good jaw between two survivors of creeping age, and we spoke pleasantly for a short while as he delivered a snap history of himself and his siblings.

When my shopping was finished, there was my husband, seated in the vestibule with our little Riley in his lap, waiting for me, and talking with a lovely young woman who greeted me familiarly, then reminded me she used to work as a cashier at our local Salvation Army thrift shop. She had decided to quit employment there though she had good words about the place, to look elsewhere for satisfaction; her ideal being in the fashion industry in Toronto. In the meanwhile, she busied herself as a volunteer and that was what she was doing there, having set up a booth for a neighbourhood charity in support of people in financial need, and was collecting financial donations to that end.

In the car, driving home, my husband informed me he had bought a vanity for the laundry room and had to return to Lowe's with the truck to pick it up. This vanity is a bit of a monster; with a carrara marble top, solid wood base and inserted porcelain sink, it weighs a ton. All of that for a laundry room! Between us, with the use of a dolly and a ramp up the steps in the garage into the house we managed to manoeuvre it from the truck to the house. My portion of the efforts minuscule needless to say, with my husband muscling the enterprise to success.

It sits now, temporarily in the hallway between the laundry room, the powder room and the kitchen. Now, all that's left to do is to disconnect and remove the existing sink, figure out the plumbing moves to install the new replacement, an enterprise the very thought of which exhausts me, but represents pure exhilaration to my ever-enterprising husband.

Unexpectedly, Jessica called this morning. Isn't it always a pick-me-up when you're given news of an upturn in your material fortunes, isn't it just!

I was right on the cusp of pouring the batter for a banana cake into the baking dish I had prepared, with the convection oven pre-warmed, when the telephone rang and I set down the mixing bowl and the spatula I was holding and answered the telephone. There was a longish pause after I responded, then Jessica's sweet voice greeting me, and asking me how I am.

Is it not entirely disarming to know that people are interested in your well-being? Even complete strangers who introduce themselves as "Jessica"? Lout that I am I responded rather differently, I imagine, than she was given to anticipate, by asking instead of answering, what I could do for her. A pause followed, then the smooth delivery to inform me of my great good fortune.

For I had been exceptionally selected to be the recipient of an offer no one in their right mind could conceivably refuse: a cut-rate holiday package to Bermuda was mine, along with the opportunity to vie for cash and gifts on taking up the offer.

Indeed, I wasn't able to hear the entire offer of glad tidings because of my continuing bad manners in cutting her spiel short by saying, "Jessica, Jessica? Thanks for calling. No need for you to continue. I am sincerely disinterested."

Silence again, as I hung up the line.

Not without feeling slightly badly for Jessica, since a job is a job.

Then I returned to my cake-baking enterprise.

In the late 1980s when we were living in the United States, there were many customs held dear in the U.S. that were unfamiliar to Canadians. One of them was the way in which Thanksgiving was celebrated; in Canada the chosen date since mid-20th-Century has always been the second Monday in October. A salubrious time of year, when fall has arrived in full colour lending to the festive atmosphere.

     A Black Friday flyer advertising deals at a Canadian retailer. (Photo by Mike James)

 

Following Thanksgiving is the children's occasion of Hallowe'en, another social exercise in festivities accompanying the bleakness of fall leading into winter. When Christmas draws close, the frantic activities associated with incessant shopping for gifts culminates the day after, on the 26th, when Boxing Day becomes a shopper's Mecca in for bargains. Those are the fall-winter traditions of Canada leading into the new year.

While Boxing Day -- a modern-day transformation of traditional 19th-Century Britain's upper-crust tradition of setting aside a day when household staff and others in service to the wealthy and the landed gentry were awarded their gifts in boxes after having spent Christmas in service to their employers -- remains a Canadian shopping tradition, it is beginning to take second fiddle to the American shopping madness of Black Friday.

That the day following American Thanksgiving results in the frenetic activity of people thronging to shopping malls has made its absurd entry into Canada is not totally surprising. American popular culture seeps effortlessly through the Canadian social culture wall, a porous and welcoming screen readily infiltrated.



But for anyone who views the shopping experience with dismay when people become so enamoured of the opportunity to possess themselves of more material goods, seeking out favourable pricing, and falling victim to the ever-inventive clutches of social media, advertisers and public relations firms firmly entrenched in the profitable business of creating a hysteria over !Sales! and !Shopping! posting glowing portraits of the family that shops together stays together, it becomes disgustingly disturbing.

Shoppers were shaken up last year at Toys "R" Us in Wisconsin, when a woman named Lanessa Lattimore threatened to shoot shoppers who were waiting in line outside the store. A confrontation began after the woman tried to cut the line of several hundred people. Lanessa told CNN, "Everybody was cutting in line. But there was one girl who was threatening me, so I told her that I'd shoot her." 

 

 

While we certainly don't know her intimately we feel we know her well. Like someone you've known for many years on a very casual basis but with whom you have formed a friendly, inquisitive and caring relationship. She has worked for the Salvation Army Thrift Shop for thirty years. In locations other than the one in which we've become accustomed to seeing her.

We drop by fairly often, as often as once a month. Either to drop off things that we no longer need, or to look about to see what's on offer that we would ourselves like to acquire. It's a great source for second-hand books of all varieties, and we've found quite a lot of truly excellent books there over the years. And over the years she has always been there.

When we first met her she was of course quite a bit younger. I admired her panache, her shining cap of auburn hair, cut just perfectly to frame her face, a very open and friendly face. She always greeted our little dogs before she would greet us, smiling at us while she ministered affectionately to our little pals, always ensconced in a carry-bag placed on the infant seat of one of their shopping carts. They grew to know her, too.

She loved animals and it was a sore point with her that the apartment in which she lived would not permit pet ownership. On the other hand, she knew the heartache of losing a beloved pet, so she also felt conflicted about acquiring another animal companion. So she did the next-best thing, bestowing affection on other peoples' pets. Her daughter's among them, the owner of a chihuahua. She and her daughter occasionally went on trips together, a few times to Florida, and she loved it.

When we dropped by there yesterday I was surprised that the cap of blazing red had been replaced by black. After all those years. The colour alteration doesn't change anything about her, though, she still looks good wearing it. Better that, I suppose, than the natural steel-grey I imagine to lurk under those raven tresses. I'd stopped decades earlier colouring my hair when our youngest son, not yet thirty at the time asked why I bothered. And I thought to myself then, why do I?

She's gathering time to reach her approaching 60th birthday. Grimacing, as she stated it. And she said, she's tired. She's planning to retire. She'll apply to have residence in a senior's home. She'll join some seniors' activities. A walking club among them. She doesn't quite know whether to look forward to all of that, but she reiterates that she doesn't have the willingness to continue working. Simply put, she's tired. Whether of the work itself or simply of the idea of working, she didn't clarify.

When she does leave, we assured her, we'll be among many who will miss her presence.

Although of course it was madly delusional; it almost seemed yesterday as though Nature was reconsidering her annual invitation to winter to take up residence here again. The stage was certainly set and most convincingly. We'd had a series of snowfalls, one serious enough to leave a considerable amount of snow covering everything, and cemented into place as it were, by falling temperatures more reflective of December than November.

Even while we appreciated its beauty on the landscape, white-washed and brilliant, the wind that accompanied the snowfalls made for some pretty chilly days. There's nothing quite like the combination of piercingly chill winds and plunging temperatures to convince even the most optimistically recalcitrant, intent on lingering in fall mode, that winter has arrived.

Four days ago the daytime high temperature here was minus-6 with stiff winds; that miserable duo of winter. Yesterday, however, we were basking disbelievingly in an atmosphere of late-summer return with the temperature hovering at the plus-18-degree mark. And the wind, though robust, seemed downright tender. Even though the sky was heavily overcast with what looked like rainclouds rimmed with threatening dark greys after the all-night rain of the night before, the sun managed to coquettishly wave to us a few times from its perch above.

Even with the absence of the extreme cold and wretched wind, and the snow having melted, we knew, as we hiked through the forest starting out just after three in the afternoon yesterday, that we would be returning home in the dark of evening dusk rapidly becoming the blank, black stare of night. Shortening daylight hours the most convincing of all indicators that winter really has arrived. Our respite was short-lived, aggressive winds overnight brought in the cold again and we're back to what passes as normal.

There, it's gone. Sold. To the first person who looked at it. Unsurprisingly. It is extraneous to our needs. We had meant it for our granddaughter who really liked it the best of all model cars. But she's now studying in Toronto at U.of T., living in residence and has no need of a vehicle.

So we put it up for sale. Kind of torn between keeping it since we become rather fond of our possessions but realizing how unnecessary it is. Bought in 2008 it's a Honda Civic Coupe, sleek silver with a retractable roof-top and a mere 9,300 km of driving. Never winter-driven, but my husband bought expensive ice tires last winter and had it oil-trelled for winter for our granddaughter. But it had just been left to sit, undriven in her mother's garage.






When it was returned to us, we kept it for a few months, drove it several times and then put it up for sale. I never, truth told, liked a two-door car, finding it inconvenient. My husband liked it because it's such a 'peppy' car, very responsive, easy to drive.

The fellow who came around yesterday, middle-aged, with his mother in tow, while his wife was off shopping at a nearby shopping mall, saw it, test-drove it, and decided it was just the car he wanted. And he certainly wanted it. The price was negotiated and accepted.

This morning my husband set off driving it to a strip mall some miles distant from where we live, where the purchaser was waiting, having taken the day off work in his anxiety to possess the car. They took it to the garage where he gets his work done, and the mechanics there professed never to have seen a car in better shape. From there they went to the license bureau located nearby, and changed the ownership.

Done.

Last night we settled in to watch the film Defiance, starring a British actor I'd never liked, Daniel Craig. Although I have read books about the Holocaust since I was a young girl with the dark and dreadful knowledge of what had occurred to the Jews of Europe in the dreadful years of Nazi occupation of the continent, I often avoid watching films depicting that era. They are simply much too personally painful.

Daniel Craig plays Tuvia Bielski, one of four brothers who resisted the Nazis in Defiance. Photograph: Karen Ballard/PR

I'll never view Daniel Craig in the same way again; he managed a creditable performance as one of four brothers who refused to surrender their lives and those of other Jews to the horrific Nazi extermination machinery. This, at a time when the inexorable drive to isolate Jews, surround and capture them, place them into ghettoized work gangs and ultimately deliver them to death camps was taking place all over Europe.

This story, however, takes place in Byelorussia, now part of Poland, where pogroms and anti-Semitism among Russians, Poles and Ukraines had a particularly long tradition in the culture and where many of the death camps were constructed with that knowledge. That knowledge being that it was not very likely that much of a protest would arise from among the occupied inhabitants who would no doubt see it in their best interests to invest their own activities in lock-step with the Nazis.

Not only were their Jewish neighbours detested by and large, mistrusted and held in contempt, but they were also seen as a detriment to others' material well-being with the widely-held belief that they sought to control everything; global finances, news dissemination and ownership, social-cultural norms --  to enrich themselves on the avenue to world domination. The scant handful of non-Jews who believed otherwise and risked their lives to aid Jews escape death represents the salvation of humanity.

When Jews were rounded up and whatever of value they possessed suddenly inherited by the Nazis, their abandoned farms, homes and whatever was left that could hold some value became the property of their neighbours. Infamously, at the conclusion of WWII, when survivors returned to their villages expecting to be welcomed and to retake possession of their lives, their homes were found to be occupied and 'owned' by their one-time neighbours who in some instances were prepared to finish what the Holocaust left uncompleted.

In this atmosphere of ghettoes being emptied by the Third Reich commandants tasked with the vital task of eradicating Jews from existence, rumours of what awaited those thinking they were being taken to work camps caused some to flee to the surrounding forests for haven from what they knew really awaited them: the final solution of death. They had already witnessed the barbarity of the Nazis and those they recruited to their aid.

Identified by the yellow star, isolated from mainstream society, unemployable, lacking any vestiges of human rights, sequestered into enclosed ghettoes, transported to work camps until they were exhausted from labour and privation they were further transported to the ovens of the death camps, some of which had two divisions; that of labour, that of death. The four Bielski brothers who witnessed atrocities taking place with the aid of local authorities determined to save themselves.

And in the process they gathered up other Jews anxious to seek any means possible to separate themselves from what seemed the inevitable. Living in their various forest enclaves from which they were forced time and again to abandon what they had built, to resettle elsewhere in the forest surrounded by farms and villages, they managed to evade death, to shelter and feed thousands of Jews despite deadly encounters with local gendarmes and German searchers prepared to annihilate them.

That, in the end, after years of evasion and living within the confines of a forest, building rough shelters and foraging for food looted from local communities; caring for one another as best they could, and experiencing being strafed by German airstrikes and by tank fire, 1,200 Jews and the four brothers managed to survive the war. As unbelievable a story, albeit a true one, as the exploit of a fascist storm battling as an Axis coalition, the Allied resistance of the free world.

This past week's rush into winter, leaving us with sub-zero daytime temperatures, high winds albeit with full sun on some days has meant that the ground had frozen and the hitherto-wet-clay foundation of the trails, even blanked by the snow that has also fallen, is now moderately usable by us in remaining over on our side of the ravine where all the bridge reconstruction is taking place.

To be sure, we felt that work would have been wrapped up, uncompleted, as soon as snow began flying and the temperature dropped; a formula unkind to outdoor construction work. But we were wrong, the crews, while having been mysteriously absent for weeks at a time when the weather was still relatively moderate are now daily on the job, driving their front-end loaders and diggers and other large tracked vehicles meant for the heavy-lift work of transporting dirt away from the bridge sites and gravel toward them.

A late December finish date had been announced in a more or less casual manner when the bridge demolition had been announced, and I was personally convinced that the finish date would far more likely be spring, perhaps late spring, given the long absences with nothing being done, and the weather closing in to winter. But there they are, those hardy men and their machines, working away. We can hear their muffled mechanical sounds from where we live when they're working closer toward our end.

While the weather was still tolerable, ensuring that the trails, mucked up by the tracked vehicles became impassable, we were crossing the main street to attain the other end of the ravine. An area that is breathtakingly beautiful in some of its spaces, but nowhere near capable of offering us the lengthy trails we're more accustomed to. But it's quiet and accessible and represents an alternative we're grateful for.

In this frigid week of extreme cold and brutal winds we were returning to our own side of the ravine since the freeze-up has made the tracked trails amenable to our passage. Unable to take our usual routes, we must backtrack and bushwhack to arrive at the circuit we had always taken, but without the usual option of returning through the avenues of our choice; some longer, some shorter. The end result being a much longer trek where we're out for closer to two hours rambling in the ravine than the hour or hour-and-a-half we're accustomed to.

At some junctures it's impossible not to come across a tracked vehicle with which we must share the trail, so we step aside to allow it to pass, each of us waving, the driver and us. The last time this happened the driver pulled his vehicle over, though we had stepped safely off the now-widened trail, and shut the engine off. We apologized for his inconvenience and he laughed, saying no bother at all; after all, he said, he gets paid by the hour, chuckle.

Charlie is a big galumphing, hairy, happy crossbreed. Could be some Newfoundland in her. We've known her for a number of years and whenever she greets us it's with the kind of enthusiasm that might be reflected in seeing a long-lost relative for the first time in too many years. She exhibits an excess of emotion that can be seen, apart from her knock-over rubbing against our legs, in her deep brown, expressive eyes. She is irresistible. And she's cherished by her human companion.

She is still emotionally needful, and it's not quite possible to exhaust her insistence on remaining rubbed up hard against me while I knead and manipulate her ears, stroke her and admire her zest for life, although I can soon enough become exhausted from the sheer drive she displays to insinuate herself into a situation where focus must be on her alone. Riley, our own little master-manipulator, is bored by it all.

I thought, yesterday, that I saw her beard becoming grey and mentioned that. Her companion laughed, reminding me she's only four years old. Born the same day of the same month, he said, as his son. And so, I quipped, since it was a spring month, is your son afflicted with Seasonal Affective Disorder? And then the man whom we have never seen otherwise than carefree and praising the beauty of the day no matter weather conditions, grew instantly sober, and he responded, no; schizophrenia.

And then this man who always forcefully overrides any conversation so that it is always he who leads and no one else can manage a comment, spoke at length about his 26-year-old son who once had briefly lived in a group home, but had to return to live with them because his psychoses are so prevalent, hard to treat, unpredictable and barely manageable. He spoke of the many drugs prescribed in a still-vain attempt to manage his son's condition, the tense sadness that prevails, their efforts to help him, and the relief that comes only at night when bedtime drug doses knock his son out until the day is introduced at the first nudges of dawn.

Eventually we parted, he offering his usual gay parting shot of 'enjoy the day'. His long rambles in the ravine, it seems now to us, must represent a brief respite from exposure to his son's confused pain and misery, relayed to his parents who, despite expert medical care and advice, are destined to be witness throughout their lives to the steady decay of a child they so love.

We did enjoy the day, the ramble through the frozen landscape, despite unseasonable cold and a miserable wind that enhanced the cold. A slight annoyance, the weather, in an otherwise perfect atmosphere. It is, as our friendly acquaintance always likes to remind us, nothing but slight imperfections that we speak of when in a complaint-mode. Our focus should be on gratefulness for what we have, for it is much.

Ladybug, ladybug
Fly away home
Your house is on fire
And your children are gone

That's what we used to chorus when we were children. At that time we viewed the sighting of a ladybug as a good omen, they were benign little creatures, and beautiful to look at, as well. Where most children disliked most bugs, the ladybug was an exception, with her sweet reputation and attractive appearance, non-threatening and an 'acceptable' natural part of the ecosystem.

For the last ten years something has happened to somewhat alter that perception. And certainly we're no longer children. It appears that the U.S. government decades ago permitted the entry of an Asian species of ladybug to North America. Perhaps because they were Asian in origin it was thought they could be controlled once the onset of winter threatened their existence.

The cute little ladybug becomes a little less cute in large numbers

But they're clever little entities; they seek entrance by whatever means possible to heated interiors to overwinter. People living rurally know just how difficult it is to restrain them from invasion. Their numbers can seem astronomical at times. Although we're not rural dwellers we have come to expect that in late fall there will be what looks like swarms of ladybugs about, slipping into the house when they can.

The Asian ladybug has also invaded southern Ontario including vintage Ontario wineries. They were first brought to North America from Japan in 1988. ((CBC))

There's a reason why they're not looked upon kindly, as used to be the case. They bite. They're obviously aggressive where our traditional North American ladybugs never were. These are not the innocent little sweet-tempered ladybugs that might alight on a pinky allowing close observation and the opportunity to murmur the singsong warning she should return to her brood.

I was surprised a few nights back when, cleaning up the kitchen after dinner, I suddenly became aware of a minuscule whirl close by, and looked down to see a ladybug had perched itself on my sweatered arm. No idea where it came from, always on the alert to ensure no outdoor creatures share our indoor space.

My husband was shaking out the dinner tablecloth at the side door and I asked him to remove it and place it outside. He demurred, but only at placing it outside in the miserable windy cold the tiny creature had been escaping.

He carefully removed it from my sweater, enfolded it in a tissue and took it downstairs to the basement, releasing it among the gathered-up earth-laden bulbs of the over-wintering begonias where he felt it would be comfortable while it waited out a Canadian winter.

Almost 35 years ago when our oldest son decided to attend University of Toronto to study music performance, parting with him was a blow I was unable to surmount with ease, despite the fact that both his father and I wanted him to get on with his life and to achieve the goals he had set for himself. His absence from our daily life was a tribulation and a trial. I began what would amount to a never-ending stream of letters, telling him in detail what had occurred at home in his absence, to ensure he would himself not feel estranged emotionally.

When our younger son followed his older brother to study science at University of Toronto, my sense of bereavement only increased. And so did the letter-writing. True, we travelled often to Toronto to check on their well-being and to reassure ourselves and them as well that all was going according to the normal life-path of young people setting out to become educated and to forge their way in the world.

Our daughter, after her initial year at University of Ottawa, took up her own technical profession through her studies at Algonquin College, but she remained at home until the time she made a home of her own but remaining within the close travel orbit of the city. I saw no need to write letters to her, our contact was frequent. When our granddaughter was born we looked after her daily through the working week while her mother was employed. And when they eventually moved when our granddaughter was nine, 100 km distant from us and we were dependent on seeing them on weekly visits I tentatively began writing to our grandchild, but that didn't last very long.

I'm still writing to our boys. My correspondence to them has dropped from its twice-weekly schedule to one letter per week. In the mid-earlier years when my husband and I lived abroad, three letters went out bi-weekly to all three children before the advent of personal computers with the use of a very small portable typewriter reliant on heat-transfer technology to print on special paper.

It is as though by continuing the correspondence-contact by mail that tenuous connection remains intact. Needless to say there are regular visits to spend time with us throughout the space of each year. Even though of course, there are telephone conversations and email connections; our sons have emailed us from all corners of the world in their many travels; contact often seems ephemeral.. Using regular mail I'm able to send along the occasional photograph, and more often newspaper clippings that may be of interest to them although of course the same can be done with email attachments.

Old habits refuse to fade away. It is, of course, more than merely habit. I still on occasion dream about them all, as children, still living at home; the intimate past comes knocking at the door of dreamland reminding me that it lives on, deep in my subconscious.

The question must be asked and returned to repeatedly until a response is forthcoming: why is it that Islam is so formidably averse to acknowledging the equal rights of those who praise and are faithful to a religion other than Islam?

BBC News

An equally urgent question is why is it that Muslims in general and Palestinians in particular feel it is just and simply their due that they must monopolize an ancient site sacred to Judaism, refusing to permit Jews access to the foremost revered symbol of their religion and culture while Muslims are free to pray at the same site which they claim as their third most holy?

The funerals of Aryeh Kupinsky and Cary William Levine, both Israeli-American, and British-Israeli Avraham Goldberg have also been attended by thousands. Their three coffins were displayed next to each other.

And why is it that Muslims who declare their religion to be one of peace and harmony will march in furious and violent torment inflicting harm on others on the suspicion that those 'others' have spurned Islam or in some manner defiled the memory and the dignity of Prophet Mohammed, while as purportedly civil human beings in obedience to their god, there are no such marches or campaigns to defy and condemn the violence perpetrated around the world on helpless Muslims and non-Muslims alike in the name of their sacred religion?


Why as well, is it that an organized political movement albeit with a tribal victimhood ideology fostering revenge, can incite its dependents to violence while simultaneously aspiring to responsible statehood and in so doing receiving the support of Western civilized countries, yet all are mute in the face of one terrorist act of murderous violence after another launched by Palestinians against Israeli citizens?

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  Israeli police and rescue workers outside the Kehilat Yaakov synagogue in Jerusalem after a terror attack there on November 18, 2014. (photo credit: Yonatan Sindler/FLASH90)
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  Ultra-orthodox Jewish men stand inside the entrance of a synagogue that was attacked by two Palestinians earlier in the morning in the ultra-Orthodox Har Nof neighborhood in Jerusalem on November 18, 2014. The Hebrew writing in candles says "House of God." (photo credit: AFP/JACK GUEZ)
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  Israeli police outside the Kehilat Yaakov synagogue in Jerusalem after a terror attack there on November 18, 2014. The bodies of two terrorists covered with plastic are seen on the ground. (photo credit: Yonatan Sindler/FLASH90)
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  Police and ZAKA crews outside the Kehilat Bnei Torah synagogue, where two terrorists attacked Jewish congregants during prayer on November 18, 2014 (photo credit: Yonatan Sindel/ flash 90)
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  People outside the scene of a terror attack in Jerusalem's Har Nof neighborhood on November 18, 2014. (photo credit: Marissa Newman / Times of Israel)
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  Israeli Zaka emergency services volunteers carry the body of a Palestinian assailant who was shot dead while attacking a synagogue in Jerusalem on November 18, 2014. (photo credit: AFP / GALI TIBBON)
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  Blood on prayer shawls and prayer books seen inside the synagogue where four people were killed in Jerusalem on November 18, 2014. (photo credit: Kobi Gideon/GPO/FLASH90)
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  Bystanders in Jerusalem's Har Nof neighborhood at the scene of a terror attack in a synagogue that left at least four dead (photo credit: Times of Israel/Marissa Newman)
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  Israeli emergency services personnel gathers blood and other human remains from the sidewalk for proper burial at the scene of an attack, by two Palestinians, on Israeli worshippers at a synagogue in the ultra-Orthodox Har Nof neighborhood in Jerusalem on November 18, 2014 (photo credit: AFP/Jack Guez)
   

The latest carnage to take place in Israel at the hands of Palestinian terrorists, striking ostensibly in defence of the al-Aqsa mosque located on what Muslims refer to as the Noble Sanctuary and Jews call the Temple Mount where they are not permitted to build a synagogue, much less pray at their ancient heritage site has drawn praise from across the Muslim world.

Why is that?

Just by coincidence we happened to be at the same place, same time on Saturday afternoon.
We hadn't seen them in several years. They were our across-the-street-just-up-the-road neighbours for many years. When we first moved into our house 22 years ago they were already there with their young children. By the time they moved several years back the street had become a busier place because of those children, now adults. Boyfriends and girlfriends and sleep-overs of course, but drug-dealing as well, the talk of the neighbourhood.

He worked in construction, his specialty cement, and she had risen to become a deputy minister of human resources in some government department. They were all extremely nice people, children included, very personable. He was forever puttering about, doing something, although it was difficult to appreciate what he accomplished, despite his hard efforts; physical exertion did not at all faze him. He began to talk about the wonderful piece of property they'd bought in the Haliburton Highlands. And their plan to build a house there, and end up living there.

When she retired from her well-paid job with its excellent gold-plated retirement funding her pensioned  future that's just what they did. They sold their house; houses on this street go quickly and for very good prices; and removed themselves from the city. It's quieter now on the street, but they're missed, as are most of the old-timers who have decided to down-size or move elsewhere for whatever reason.

We had driven to the west end of the city to drop by the stained glass shop my husband uses for his supplies, and they had driven from their home about a half-hour drive distant from Arnprior for a family reunion. On the way they dropped by the stained glass shop bringing with them a knock-off Tiffany shade they enquired about repairing. Its repair would outstrip the cost they paid for the lamp, but they could no doubt afford it.

I barely recognized him at first; he was dressed so spiffily, quite unlike the fellow I knew who never gave much thought to his attire. He looked well and seemed happy, and so did she and I told them so. He wanted to linger to talk and enthuse about their move. In the course of which he told me that they had both had hip replacements and he had developed bursitis as well, so it has become increasingly difficult for him to get around, to do all the things that he wanted to do. They're semi-isolated and I asked how long a drive to the closest medical facilities; about a half-hour, he said. They had joined a local seniors' group, he grimaced, though they're 20 years younger than us, and we haven't done so.

They love it there in the summer months, with their dock beside a little lake, where they swim constantly. Not so much in the winter when they mostly don't do much of anything. He has a boat, but hasn't invested in a Ski-Doo; it doesn't much interest him. Occasionally they don snowshoes and flop about, but nothing spectacular. In all the years they'd lived on the street they had never once ventured into the ravine. They aren't much interested in wildlife, though there is plenty of deer around, and sightings of other wildlife are rare to them. For years while living on our street they'd had a family dog, a sweet-tempered golden retriever which was seldom allowed in the house, though housekeeping niceties never seemed a priority. The dog had its place, in its doghouse, in the backyard.

Since we began crossing over into the south portion of the ravine adjoining our neighbourhood we hadn't yet been there on a Saturday. Up until yesterday we seldom saw anyone else on the trails. They're quite different than those on our portion of the ravine, less wild perhaps, more groomed by nature. There are the same good-sized pines and beeches but there are also some very elderly cedars, some of a height and girth that we just don't see on the upper ravine portion. Such unusual tree specimens always attract our interest and admiration.

And nor are the trails as long, but they are pleasant. The heights and depths of the ravine on our side are far less pronounced. The peaks and valleys less demanding of physical exertion. At the end of the trail there is where one gains entry to a large park with a baseball diamond and several excellent installations for children; playgrounds that are familiar to us from the time we used to take our granddaughter there for a little social recreation as a break from the more familiar playgrounds closer to the street we live on.

This is also where a bridge had been replaced the year before. It's far more robust than the one that had preceded it. Perched on concrete pylons and the supports being of steel, the upper portion remains wood, but the construction is meant to last, on a forest floor base comprised of clay and sand and given to slumping. This is obviously the prototype for the replacement bridges that will eventually stand along our portion of the ravine to make up for the four that have been dismantled.

Since it was a Saturday we expected to see more people about and there were indeed people walking their dogs there. Among them people we haven't see in quite awhile, people whom we'd commonly seen daily in years gone by. To discover now, years later, that these good people lived across the main street we had to cross to access this portion of the ravine. One couple who had for years walked a lively cross-breed named Sam, doting in him as people do who love their companion animals.

Many years ago someone had dropped off a dog on the far reaches of the ravine beyond even where we were wont to access. It would roam the ravine and was heard barking but no one could get near it for the dog skittered off when someone would approach. Eventually its den was discovered; when the dog had been left there to fend for itself it was left with a wire cage lined with an old blanket and there it returned from its forays, perhaps searching for food. People began dropping off dog food for it close by the cage.

And eventually this couple gained its trust sufficiently so that it allowed them to approach, and take him into their custody. He became a beloved companion for Sam, and they both lived out their lives in their home. When both of the dogs left them they just couldn't seem to bring another dog into their lives. The last time we saw them both several years back they were picking up dog litter that others hadn't bothered to take off the trail when their dogs did what was natural to them.

It is beyond difficult for the ordinary human mind to grasp the significance and wonder at the colossal advance in space exploration made manifest by the European Space Agency's success in landing a tiny robotic science laboratory on a speeding comet that made a ten-year journey across 6.4-billion kilometres through the solar system to succeed in what surely must have seemed a dauntingly impossible mission.

That the Space Agency could even predict with such accuracy when the first signal from Philae would reach Earth to confirm that landing after the suspenseful detachment from its mother ship Rosetta is nothing short of amazing; they predicted the first signal would come in at 11:03 a.m. and so it did on Wednesday, November 12. Capping a journey and an intent beyond mere imagination of even the most feverishly aware science fiction writer.

"We are on the comet. We are sitting on the surface and Philae is talking to us", announced the lander manager, Dr. Stephan Ulamec. "It's complicated to land on a comet. It's also complicated to understand what has happened during the landing. What we know is that we touched down and we landed on the comet We had a very clear signal and we also received data from the lander. That is the very good news.
"The not-so-good news is that the anchoring harpoons did not fire So the lander is not anchored to the surface. Did we just land in a softsand box and everything is fine? Or is there something else happening? We still do not fully understand what has happened.
"Some of the data indicated that the lander may have lifted off again. It touched down and was rebouncing. We saw data on the solar generator which could be interpreted that the lander lifted off and started to turn itself. About two hours later this information of turning stopped. So maybe today, we didn't just land, we landed twice."

Twice indeed; the initiating bounce sent Philae into a seven-hour-long lift-off from which it returned to the comet finally, to rest under the shade of a cliff in that landscape of house-sized boulders, craters and alien cosmic rockface. The little science laboratory went right to work, sending back reams of data to the excited scientific minds sifting through it all, beyond joyful at the success of the mission. With the realization that because of where the little lab had finally landed its solar-fuelled generators would soon lapse into deep sleep for lack of sunlight, under the shade of that great cliff.

Even trying to imagine the cold black indifference of outer space, and a space ship hurtling purposefully through it all to finally put a distance of a half-billion kilometres between itself and Earth, to obey instructions it received from the command centre in Darmstadt, Germany to focus on landing on the surface of a speeding comet, everything depending on precise follow-up, boggles the mind. Let alone the design of the ship and its landing cargo, and the inputting of instructions for geological-scientific retrieval data to be beamed back to Earth.

The dazzling enormity of the wonder of human inquisitiveness aligned with the magnitude of human scientific ingenuity is difficult to quite comprehend. The colossal wonder that is Nature, and the incredible functioning capabilities that she endowed Earthling human beings with to enable them to explore her magnificent house of existence reflects a reality resistant to complete mindful digestion.

 
A probe named Philae is seen after it landed safely on a comet in this CIVA handout image

Often when I'm taking a freshly-baked fruit pie out of the oven as I did this morning my mind delves into memory and takes me back almost 60 years to the very first kitchen of my own as a young housewife. We had rented a flat in a house in a downtown Toronto neighbourhood. Not quite a flat, but most of the second floor in the modest house. We had a large bedroom of our own, and a neat little kitchen, a corridor reaching from one to the other at opposite ends of the second floor. In between there was another bedroom and a bathroom. We shared the bathroom with all the house residents, the man and woman who owned the house, and the renter of that second bedroom whom we might see occasionally but who seemed to us ghostlike, not quite there in actual presence.

We were just twenty then, had been married for two years, and finally had a place of our own. Before then we had lived temporarily with my husband's father and mother and then with mine. Neither gave us much pleasure, and both came with their complications and interferences and discomforts. With a place of our own we could do as we wished, even use the laundry machine of our landlady who never complained as my mother-in-law had that I was abusing her washing machine by washing jeans in it.

Because we both were employed we devised a home work schedule for ourselves to keep our home neat and tidy, dividing up the duties. My husband cleaned our bedroom weekly and I assigned myself the kitchen clean-up. We were proud of that little kitchen for which we had bought a refrigerator, stove and table-and-chair set, the latter reflecting the fashion of that time of wrought-iron legs and formica top. I was determined to keep it all spotlessly clean.

I was also determined to fill in my meal-preparation how-to gaps, and that was a big, empty space. I had never been interested in what my mother concocted in the kitchen because I was never enamoured of her cooking. Unlike her older sister who was a master hand at cooking and baking my mother never succeeded in producing much that was truly edibly good-tasting, and not for lack of trying. She simply hadn't the innate talent, despite her remarkable efforts.

To say I was clueless in the kitchen would be to understate the matter. My husband had a solution; he went out and splurged on a tome of a cookbook, the American-Jewish Cookbook. I consulted it feverishly and set about preparing decent meals with great effort and little reward. I never convinced myself however, that I was a kitchen knock-off of my mother. And gradually I began to produce passable fare. I had developed an unfortunate habit of propping the cookbook up at the backsplash of the gas stove. Predictably, the book once caught on fire and became scorched. To the present day I use that tired old reference guide to food preparation, its blighted bottom burnt brown, but rescued by the usual swift response of my husband.

One weekend afternoon after I had scrubbed the kitchen floor and produced a shining-clean kitchen, I was withdrawing a cherry pie from the oven, and somehow it slipped from my grip. My dismay was released in an anguished cry of despair that brought my husband running to the kitchen to observe the result of a hot cherry pie filling covering in bright red splotches every surface of the little floor, all the loops in the kitchen table's ironwork, transforming the stove from pristine white to gory red. I sat down and cried. As much for the ruination of our dinner dessert as for the besmirching of all my morning clean-up efforts; I felt I could never restore the kitchen to its pre-disaster state.

My husband comforted me, made an effort to restrain himself from laughing, led me into the bedroom, told me to read a book and set about cleaning up the mess with a pail of soapy water. But the memory of that little kitchen disaster has remained firmly lodged in memory, popping up like an unwelcome guest whenever the fragrance of a fruit pie invades our kitchen.

When our granddaughter was in our care for many years, in the years before she began attending pre-school and then elementary school we would take her daily to the many playgrounds established in the parks in our neighbourhood. And there were plenty to choose from among; at least four in easy walking distance.

To get to the furthest among them we would cross a major street that intersected between our own and the ravine to continue along ravine pathways which eventually led, in about a twenty-minute perambulation, to several playgrounds further than those more closely adjacent where we live. We hadn't been in that part of the ravine for many years. At least fourteen; she is now eighteen and a student at University of Toronto. When she was really young I would backpack her through the ravine in the opposite direction, to a playground attached to one of the many elementary schools present in the neighbourhood.

Now that the ravine has become a maze of interconnected and non-connected alternatives since our usual circuit and the four bridges enabling access to the various trails have been hugely compromised -- the trails widened considerably to enable tracked vehicles to aid in the process of destroying the bridges and prepare the areas for the building of new bridges has taken place -- we find ourselves trudging along miserable clay-mud tracks, slipping and precariously balancing ourselves as we manoeuvre our way down long hills whose access to trails otherwise has been closed off to us.

So yesterday we decided to revisit an old haunt, cross that major street and have another look at what was available to us in that direction. In essence, revisiting old trails we hadn't ventured upon, with no reason to do so, in many years. There we found little-used trails, not as extensive as our own, but in comparison to which given the prevailing conditions, readily accessible, relatively dry and more than picturesque enough for our tastes.

So, until the ground settles into its winter freeze-up and snow covers the ankle-deep muck in our part of the ravine, we'll venture on occasion to the old-new trail system that had served us so well in the past when we were new to grandparenting and the entertaining and exposure to new horizons required by young, inquisitive action-oriented children. Whose grandparents remain committed to their action-oriented devotions in the great out-of-doors.