This has not been a good day. This has been a day of ineffable sadness. A day of mourning.

A day when we had need of emotional relief, and we sought it in one another's arms, weeping. And then we sought that relief together, walking through nature. We went further afield than we usually do, and discovered that the beavers have returned to their old haunts. Unlikely to be the beavers that had occupied the creek in previous years, but perhaps offspring of the originals.

Where the old dam was, once again the water is high, host to a pair that must obviously be planning to stay awhile. Our conversation with nature this morning acted as a balm, and we appreciated that. Not that anything will reverse the irreversible, when implacable death took my younger brother to its bony bosom, but he too was completely engrossed with and loved nature. And it is in the nature of humanity to return from whence we came.

Bill Freedman, our Billy, has returned to nature. As his son Jonathan remarked, the fate that awaits us all "is what it is".

Billy

Yesterday my husband visited with  an old friend who lives several houses over from ours, on our street. He had returned a day earlier from the intensive care wing of the Ottawa Heart Institute, after his triple-heart-bypass surgery last week. Mohindar has been watched over closely by his beautiful wife Rajinder, and by his son Imeren. Even their daughter Lovelyn, mother of three very young children, was at the hospital, leaving her family in Toronto to be with her mother and father and brother.

As my husband sat and talked with our friend, they clasped one another's hands. Mohindar's family has been heeding the hospital instructions carefully; yesterday taking their father for a six-minute walk, an exercise that increases by one minute daily. But this morning an ambulance came screeching up the street and the responders returned our friend to hospital.