They're not the original owners of the house next to ours, but they have lived there for two decades, which is as long as we've known them as neighbours. And as neighbours one couldn't hope for friendlier people, easy to live alongside, quite unlike the previous occupants. There is a distance to their friendliness, but we don't mind that one bit. Good-natured onversations are as frequent as we see one another. We watched their two very young children grow up into likeable, responsible adults. And we appreciate the warmth however removed, that we share between us.

Oddly enough it is a warmth and a friendliness carefully meted out it would seem, since it doesn't appear that they have any neighbourly relations whatever with other people living on the street. True, they both work full-time, or as full-time as can be said for federal civil servants who take advantage of all the possible days-off and early-in-the-day leaving the office as can be squeezed out of the system; a fairly system-wide occurrence as far as I could see, myself once working for the federal government with ample opportunity to observe the process in play.

They have invested heavily in their home, in every sense conceivable. Over the years they have signed contracts with any number of home improvement firms, from the installation of an in-ground swimming pool, to the conversion of their floors from carpeting to wood, the make-over of their kitchen and the installation of ceramic flooring. (Most household changes we have ourselves engaged in, with my husband being both contractor and worker on his own behalf.) And on the exterior, on a number of occasions bringing in contractors to lay patio bricks, and once to construct a three-season 'cottage' onto the back of the house which turned out to be virtually unusable as it became a 'hot-box' in the summer months and a cold-storage freezer in the winter months.

But it is their home and they love it. And they also adorn it constantly. Around the pool they have placed faux palm trees and deer and rabbit statuary of colourful plastic. At Hallowe'en time they rush about transforming the front lawn into a hodge-podge of fright, complete with auditory back-up. As soon as that holiday has passed, gradually out comes all the stored and newly-purchased ornaments for the lawn, from Disney-type characters to more traditional reindeer and Santa pieces, most of which become half-buried in the snow as winds bury them through the winter months. A colourful display, however, and one that appears to please them mightily.

The flashing lights and the ornaments are not confined to the front of the house. The backyard is festooned with lights and similar ornaments are displayed there as well. So while they proudly display their affection for the Christmas holiday spirit at the front of the house, the back is never neglected. They may be invested in creating the most 'spectacular' display on the street for Christmas, since most other households either satisfy themselves with tastefully discreet and still notable lights draped here and there on trees and shrubs, or have none at all, only glimpses of bulb-lit trees visible through night-time windows.

In this, as in all other matters that people engage in, with public displays, to each his/her own.

Then and Now

"To all of you, I solemnly promise that France will do everything to destroy the army of fanatics who committed these crimes. It was this harmony that they wanted to break, shatter. It was this joy that they wanted to bury with the blast of their bombs. Well they will not stop it. We will multiply the songs, the concerts, the shows. We will keep going to the stadiums, and especially our beloved national stadium in Saint-Denis. We will participate in sports gatherings great and small. And we will commune in the best of emotions, without being troubled by our differences, our origins, our colours, our convictions, our beliefs, our religions. Because we are a single and unified nation, with the same values."
French President Francois Hollande, 2015
 
French patriotism is on high display, perhaps not quite as exuberantly passionate as it was in January after the deadly Charlie Hebdo and Jewish supermarket attacks by Islamist jihadists, but there nonetheless, as expected at a time when a subdued, shocked but defiant population hang flags in their windows in response to the even deadlier attacks that took place early this month in the 10th, 11th, and 12th arrondissements in Paris.

"Not many people living in France heard the celebrated call to arms of a relatively unknown French general, Charles de Gaulle, transmitted by the BBC on 18 June [1940] -- four days after the fall of Paris. Some eight million of them were still on the roads to the south, though by now the traffic was crawling the other way, back towards their homes in the north. But the BBC had agreed to give the Free French a slot each evening, five minutes of it in French, and after his first appel to the French, de Gaulle spoke to them again, on the 18th, 22nd, 24th, 26th and 28th. With each day that passed, his stern, measured voice gain authority. His message did not vary. It was a crime, he said, for French men and women in occupied France to submit to their occupiers; it was an honour to defy them. One sentence in particular struck a chord with his listeners. 'Somewhere', said de Gaulle, 'must shine and burn the flame of French resistance'.
From: A Train in Winter by Caroline Moorehead

Strasbourg - Alsace, Karl Roos Platz (Place Kléber in french), 13 October 1941

The flame of French resistance was nowhere to be seen by the cowed French, and there was no one to lead them when in 14 June 1940, Nazi German troops rolled into Paris in their spanking-neat uniforms, the very picture of youth, health and virility, cannons hauled by horses, infantry and troops morally unperturbed by having invaded another country, their countless tanks parading through the streets, hardened by their conquering experience in Poland where their reputation for vicious brutality preceded them.

Parisians were fearful, not knowing what to expect of their new condition of national civilian servitude to a military occupier that had vanquished its own military as the juggernaut overran Europe. They perceived the foreign invaders as polite and civil, discounting what they had heard about them in the news, while in turn the German soldiers were astonished at the meekly accepting atmosphere that prevailed from the French public, silently watching their invasion of the city, and quietly returning to their homes.

The principal target-goal of the Islamist jihadists matches that of fascist Germany; to conquer all lands that their military prowess would see fall to their violently destructive onslaught. The secondary goal was to destroy all vestiges of Jewish life, wherever it existed; in their ancient homeland where Judaism predated the religions that fed off its building precepts to give birth to new versions that disowned their Jewish heritage, and anywhere else that Jews might have settled over the millennia in their vast diaspora.

The eternal outsiders, viewed with suspicion and mistrust, anger and simmering hatred, they were easy targets because within any general population where they co-existed ran a rich vein of anti-Semitism, prepared to join forces with the malign genocidal plans of a fascist ideology committed to barbaric and horrendous acts of human depravity. Just as nature herself turns the gears of cyclical events over time-spans impossible for the human mind to fully grasp, so too does the human mind repeat unendingly the appeal to itself of destruction of the 'other'.

Members of the French police special forces evacuate the hostages after launching the assault at a kosher grocery store in Porte de Vincennes, eastern Paris, on January 9, 2015. (Photo credit: AFP/ THOMAS SAMSON)

One of my husband's first house projects shortly after we moved into this house was to finish the basement. He had plenty of space to deal with. There was roughed-in plumbing for a bathroom down there, so he planned to build a bathroom. In the space immediately reached descending the steps he planned a medium-sized room, beside it the furnace room, under the stairs a storage cupboard and beyond the medium-sized room that we designated a study, a long rectangular room meant for all-purpose activities, and it is where he set up his easel when he began painting. And where now his exercise equipment is maintained.

Upper staircase

All that is decades ago, when the roughing-in of the wall partitions, the wallboard installed, the ceiling tiles, and of course re-building the rough staircase that was in place and replacing it with a finished-wood staircase and balustrade railings of my husband's own design and manufacture, as well as the completed bathroom, made for additional living space in an already-spacious home.

Door separating first floor from staircase leading to lower floor

Another project that was completed perhaps a dozen years ago was to change the staircase leading from the main floor to the second floor from its rough pine with carpeting overlaid, to oak runners. We loved the bare oak stair treads, but once little Riley fell down those stairs and we realized the imperative of covering the treads with carpeting, but leaving the risers without. Despite which, I managed somehow to fall down those stairs back in August.

Basement staircase from study to first floor

This time, it was the stairs leading to the lower level that caught our attention for remediation when my husband slipped down them late one evening last week. Although Button had no trouble with those stairs Riley would never venture down them. Jack and Jill see no challenge in them, though Jill prefers not to descend them unless there's a good reason to do so, while Jack leaps lightly up and down them with no trouble at all.

But it is evident now that they too require that the treads be covered for safety reasons. So we went out to several home supply stores to shop around and found the carpeting we liked at Rona. An older man, very large-bodied, exceedingly pleasant, grey-bearded, looked after us in the most helpful way. He is retired, works only on Saturdays, and confessed that after several hours of standing and walking around in the store on its bare concrete floors his feet complain bitterly.

Our choice for tread carpeting

Feet, balance, locomotion and a sense of safety and security are all acute concerns as we age. And we certainly have. So, given the events of the past few months, caution informs us that bare stair treads, while attractive to look at, pose risks, and those risks mitigate against just leaving them bare. So, as usual, my husband is doing something about it.

And I'm pleased with our aesthetic selection.

Though the bone-chilling cold has relented, the emphatically high winds have not. There's a plus side, since this day and the day before have been downright balmy, temperature rising to twelve degrees. The downside is that rain has been relentless, not the kind of weather that beckons anyone to go out and enjoy a brisk walk in the woods. In our woods in particular, given the long and steep hills which, thanks to their clay base, when wet become extremely slippery. Mind, if the forest canopy were still intact, they would provide shelter from the rain, but the canopy is now bare since we're moving steadily into December, and the combination doesn't guarantee a pleasant woodland ramble.

So, no walk yesterday for us or for our two little charges. And they detest rain. It's all we can do to persuade Jillie to come out for a pee break, when needed. She was given to hiding under the family room coffee table, and more latterly just turns over on her back, baring her underside apologetically, when we advise  her it's time to go out. And then one of us picks her up and carries her down the stairs of the deck to pop her under the deck where she can stay relatively dry. Jack dutifully follows, and then erupts out of the shelter under the deck and bravely performs. Neither of them are the least bit anxious to remain outside. Romp about in the rain? Are you completely insane?

Although, on the other hand, as soon as they're indoors, haircoat damp, their enthusiasm for dashing madly about has been renewed and they stampede through the house in a flurry of movement, one chasing the other, stopping long enough to challenge one another to a boxing match, before returning to the chase again.

As for us, we can always find things to do to keep busy and after I'd finished baking an apple pie, putting on a chicken soup to cook, and prepared a bread dough, I decided to go out to the front garden to do a little gardening. Yes, in the pouring rain. Wearing a hooded rainjacket, of course. Gardening? Well, since the temperature is so yielding, I thought to pull some weeds. Not weeds exactly, but fresh green shoots that have germinated thanks to the bird feeder above attracting fly-bys and area birds to take their pick of daily sustenance.

Yes, for certain the oncoming months of icy cold, snow and ice will put 'finished' to these new growing garden volunteers, but just in case they manage to somehow persevere and return come spring ....

We had a taste yesterday of what the next four months have in store for us. Because of the snow that fell three days ago, the trails in the ravine were compromised in the sense that ascents and descents -- of which there are plenty it's a ravine, after all -- were fairly slippery and since we saw no reason yet to haul out our winter boots, we were wearing hiking boots and found it dicey getting around. Which led us the following day to strap our trusty old cleats on over the hiking boots. It makes them somewhat cumbersome, weightier, so that you know you're wearing them. Which is fine for the assurance they give that there'll be no more slipping or sliding -- or what's worse falling -- downhill but at the same time the freedom of movement is also in a sense compromised. We'll get used to it.

Today there'll be no need for them, the atmosphere is now much milder under a heavily clouded sky and the snow will have melted by the time we get out there for our walk. Yesterday, however, there was ample snow down and the going was tricky.

We were pleasantly surprised to come across old friends we haven't seen in years. They represent part of the old crowd we'd gotten to know decades ago, walking their own dogs, until one by one the dogs departed this life and some of their human companions either gave up on having other dogs, or did adopt others, but changed their routine, so we'd rarely see them. It must be at least eight years since we've seen Melissa and Harry. Their beagle Jack was beloved of our little Riley, who whenever he saw him, would rush over and turn cartwheels of delight. Riley would acrobatically leap over and around Jack, who grudgingly tolerated our little guy's antics.

Harry and Melissa look different, but they're essentially the same. Age has crept up on them both. And perhaps they were thinking the very same thing about us. Harry has gained an enormous amount of weight; he is a former police officer and had looked after his physical well-being in his earlier incarnation. Melissa worked for an NGO that did charitable work overseas, and she was often in travelling mode, but she has since slowed down. Her face was surprisingly lined and creased with age, though she remains trim.

Their dog Jack could do no wrong; he was so well loved -- other than occasionally slipping out of his collar and dashing off into the woods. Sometimes, after looking fruitlessly for him, Harry and Melissa would just return home, and await Jack's voluntary return. Sometimes it would be hours, and on occasion a full day before he would languidly make his way back home. Sometimes a neighbour returned him. Which explains why Harry would never leave him off the leash trusting he'd remain close by on the trail, and indeed he used to prepare for their mini-conflict by winding part of the leash around a hefty piece of wood to give him the strength to counteract Jack's pull.

A year and a half after losing Jack, they succumbed and brought another beagle into their home. A smaller beagle with a far different temperament, although they still for the most part keep him on the leash. He tends not to wander, though. He's eight years old now, and a year ago he was diagnosed with diabetes. So Harry and Melissa have to inject long-acting insulin twice daily and occasionally take blood-sugar readings to affirm control.  It's tougher for them now to get someone to look after the little fellow if they want to go off somewhere on a winter trip for a week or two.

But they're committed to his well-being and cheerfully take on the tribulations that come with trying to balance the needs of a small animal overtaken by a disease that makes life difficult for everyone concerned, determined to give him a fighting chance at survival for as long as possible. Oddly enough our two little rascals took immediately to this newly-introduced member of their own species, where they're far more likely to initially be wary-to-hostile when first coming into proximity of dogs they don't know.

Must be something about poodles and beagles; a friendship pact we humans know nothing about, perhaps?

We awoke yesterday to quite the surprise. Snow blanketed the entire landscape. It was cold, and it was windy, and it was obvious the snow wouldn't be going away anytime soon. We ventured out in the early afternoon wearing our usual hiking boots; too soon yet for winter boots. The snow underfoot was soft, but the ground has been well hardened with frost, and the foliage on the forest floor covered with snow which in places also had developed into icy patches, making downhill forays fairly slippery, requiring some degree of caution as we proceeded.

We came across one of our ravine-rambling friends, who walks his three border collies as regularly as we come into the ravine. This is a man for whom the past year has been a nightmare of problems. This is a man who is almost a fanatic about physical fitness. Not surprising since he has been for years a member of an RCMP swat team. He'd had to step back from his profession, this year, and certainly not voluntarily, but because the turn his life had taken gave him little other choice.

Little did he know when one of his racing bicycle's wheels got caught in a sewer grate on a main street sending him hurtling over the handlebars and onto an extremely hard surface, causing his shoulderblade to break, that this, in comparison to what he would experience at a later date, was a trifle. It took him months, understandably, after surgery that saw a metal plate, rods and screws put in place to help his shoulder mend, to recover his former physical capacity. Through the ongoing pain he continued to work out, to compete in area runs and bicycle events.

And then he began to experience memory loss and wretchedly painful headaches. It took some time for the correct diagnosis, but finally a neurosurgeon informed him that he was suffering from water on his brain, and required surgery to relieve the pressure. Another long wait ensued, but the surgery eventually was carried out, and then it was discovered that the shunt that had been inserted at the base of his brain was draining the water (through his body and into a bag) too quickly, so that the headaches and the dizziness continued. A series of adjustments was carried out and although his condition improved to the point where his memory retention was restored and the dizziness gone, the crushing headaches remained.

Another surgery has been scheduled, this time to replace the shunt which was supposed to be 89% effective but turned out to be 60% effective, putting another model in its place, in the hope that the second shunt will solve the problem completely to enable him to regain the capacity to live a normal life. That is, as normal as possible for someone for whom a shunt carrying away brain fluid represents a permanent 'solution' to a problem no one knows how it resulted.

That surgery will take precedence over another one to be scheduled to remove the metal plate, rods and screws that held his shoulder together, because their presence is now causing excruciating pain. Since the separated shoulder has now healed, their presence is considered redundant. It is, obviously, the lesser of the two emergencies.

But the neurosurgeon insists the shoulder surgery must follow the brain surgery, to minimize the chances of catastrophic infection following neurosurgery. How's that for a hard-luck health story?

The usual suspects have been prowling about, and some unusual visitors as well. There were redpolls at the feeder this morning, sharing it with chickadees and cardinals. And a small group of doves, perhaps a half-dozen, the usual number we see feeding under the birdfeeder as their breed is accustomed to doing.

The unusual guest this morning was a red-breasted nuthatch, perched alongside a cardinal. Nuthatches always like to hang around flocks of chickadees, and we've seen this one on a number of occasions.

As for the feeder meant for both birds and squirrels, it's well-occupied by red, grey and black squirrels, busy throughout the day feeding themselves against oncoming winter. The doves don't mind in the least sharing space with the squirrels; their close proximity is of no concern to either, in fact.

That winter's arrival is imminent was more than abundantly clear by the temperature, and the heavy wind gusts that prevailed yesterday, despite the presence of the sun, striking its brilliant pose from time to time, challenging belligerent grey clouds.

Overnight and through this morning the clouds have gotten the upper hand, alongside the chill temperature and wind. We awoke to a white landscape. Not entirely unexpected for this time of year, and coming down in fits of light snow for hours, alternating with larger gobs of flakes fused together.

We wonder whether Jackie and Jillie remember snow from last winter when they were young puppies. Jillie seemed enthralled by the snow, she gathered herself in ecstatic leaps and bounds around the backyard, while Jackie remained perched on the deck, impervious to her invitations to join her in mad dashes through the snow.

It's an altered landscape, one requiring that we alter arrangements in the house, hauling out heavier rubber mats at entrances to the house, and scrubbing about for winter boots, and winter jackets for our two little black imps.

Our children have inherited many of their father's traits, among them a sense of adventure, curiosity about the world at large, an eagerness to learn, and the urge to do things themselves. They have adapted their father's sense of creativity to their own and given it their personal stamp, becoming adept at art and in manipulating mechanics. From me they have no doubt inherited some traits as well, and possibly that's where the mental craft of arranging thoughts and words and conveying them through applied skills in communication comes in.

Our youngest, now in his 50th year, uses a bicycle for transportation every day, taking it from his house to the UBC campus where his office is located. He's a fresh-stream biologist, and he lives for experiences in the out-of-doors. British Columbia is perfect for him, offering him countless opportunities to get out into wilderness areas and become one with nature in the natural world if only temporarily. When he travels abroad as he does on occasion, everywhere from Ireland to Sweden, New Zealand to Australia, Italy to Spain, he also explores the natural surroundings to be found there.

About a decade ago he bought a second-hand Nissan truck with a cap, a smallish vehicle that had been used by a plumber. It now has 250,000 kilometres on it, and from time to time when it needs repairs our son tackles most of them himself. As he's preparing to do yet again. He can afford a new vehicle, but would always prefer to buy a used one. He feels the current models are much, much too gratuitously large and energy-wasteful. And he thinks he can easily get more use out of his elderly truck so he is not, at this time, interested in replacing it.

Most week-ends he goes off on overnight or several days of camping trips to various parts of the province. In the summer it's for canoeing or kayaking trips (he has built his own canoe and kayak), in the winter it's for skiing trips.  On the week-ends when he hasn't planned one of these many adventures in the out-of-doors, he does things around the house, or does pottery, or busies himself building something out of wood, because he loves working with wood, just as his father does. We have some wonderful pieces of furniture that he built. And he built them using traditional tools of the 19th and early 20th centuries.

He's a calm and collected person, someone who is always optimistic, never prepared to judge but to consider all angles of any situation. And he's generous to a fault.

Sounds like a typical mother.

Compelled by his sense of inquisitiveness, my husband is a tinkerer by inclination. And clocks fascinate him. Clocks that is of an elderly disposition, augmented by the authenticity of not only chronicling time but the elaborate elements of aesthetic appeal which they represent in their design. A half-century of scrutiny and handling, acquisition and appreciation has given him some idea of how such venerable treasures should be viewed and cared for, including mechanically.

From time to time he will go about winding up these clocks and then we're treated to an orchestration of ambient sound, from the regularity of tick-tocking to the musical notes of Westminster chimes and everything in between. And from time to time one or the other of his collection will balk and decide that it's worked hard enough over the years, no longer willing to continue.

That's when my husband applies his limitless patience to encouraging that recalcitrant clock that since it was made to tell the time it should take ongoing pride in that capacity and continue working as it should. When I view the countless hours he will devote to picking apart the constituents of the moving parts, prodding them delicately, observing carefully as they either balk or respond to slight adjustments, I wonder at the sheer quiet determination and never-ending focus of  attention these mechanical time-pieces exert from my husband.

It's true to say that his patience and capacity for indulging whatever it takes to cope with problems with an eye to overcoming them extends far beyond clocks or other mechanical devices. It is his way with life, one of many characteristics that claim my respect for this man.

Jewish Jistory in Brief

When the death camps of Nazi Germany were liberated, among those rescued from impending death through disease, starvation, general privation and deliberate murder were children. Boys between the ages of 12 and 20 who had managed against all odds to survive the brutalization of existence. There were far fewer girls who survived the rigours of the work and death camps.

Benevolent societies comprised of Jews who had escaped the Holocaust because they were living in countries other than the occupied European nations of the Third Reich, exerted themselves to bring these Jewish refugee children to places where the German hordes had not overrun countries that were too weak militarily and overwhelmed by the Nazi juggernaut to defend themselves.

There were Jewish teens numbering in the high hundreds that had been assembled in refugee camps, mostly boys, whom not government agencies abroad, but Jewish philanthropists and social groups vowed to give a second chance at life. They arranged to transport hundreds of those boys, mostly around fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen years of age who had managed to survive, many of them having seen their parents for the last time when they were assigned different 'line-ups' at arrival by cattle transport at the work camps and death camps. Some had seen their mothers and fathers die of starvation or morbid diseases. Others had seen their parents marched toward the gas chambers.

The boys were worked at factories producing munitions for the German war effort, at mines and other hard-labour places where many were worked to death and those that could, struggled to prolong their existence. When they finally arrived, after liberation, at their destinations of Britain, the United States, Canada and Palestine, their rehabilitation into life began, a slow and arduous journey from disease and privation toward what would henceforth for them represent normalcy, but one with the spectre of loss and mourning, brutality and fear always hovering in their relentless nightmares.

Very few of these children, after years of absorbing their new realities and pushing the old realities behind them, failed to make a new life for themselves where they could be self-sufficient, assume a normal life, find marriage partners, have children and become respected members of any society they joined. A vanishing few-to-none turned to exacting any manner or version of revenge. Even when one man, Meir Kahane, the political activist who founded the Jewish Defence League in an attempt to aggressively pursue an agenda of self-defence became militant, it did not reflect mainstream Jewish reaction to having been singled out by a powerfully malevolent aggressor for annihilation.

Very few survivors were unable to support themselves, ending up on welfare rolls. And far fewer had been so psychologically stricken by their experiences that they failed to respond eventually to the kindness and opportunities that opened before them to became institutionalized wards of the state. Many survivors distinguished themselves in their later careers pursued after immersing themselves in opportunities to achieve academic educations, as scientists, musicians, doctors, architects, artists, businessmen and manufacturers.

Never did human beings of the tribes of Judaism irrespective of their social backgrounds, their geographic experience, their immersion in orthodoxy or secularism, ever become a violent threat to the world around them. Yet their anecdotal reputations as threats to society never ceased, as waves of anti-Semitic tropes assailed them time and again. Never did the world assemble the power of brotherhood, compassion and regret beyond the general agreement in the United Nations to support the declaration of statehood for a Jewish nation, Israel, and then once, only.

The Jewish state stands as a beacon of liberty and security for the world's Jews. Yet the Jewish embrace of democracy and its instinctive respect for human rights and equality led it to absorb within itself the welfare of non-Jews, even those who had no love for anything Jewish, in a geography where the vast majority of its inhabitants express a viral deadly hatred for Jews and all things Jewish.

And the result is a Jewish state where Jews, though threatened by outside forces surrounding that state, can feel they are protected and valued. While all around them the nations that had mounted one violent military campaign after another in efforts to dislodge the nation from its heritage perch in the Middle East oppressed their own people, in corrupt reigns where malicious power and hostile threats toward others expressed what was normal for them. The stability and peace that engulfs Israel stops at its borders outside of which a vicious chaotic maelstrom of historical tribal and sectarian animosities gather strength resulting in wholesale slaughter causing millions of people to flee in terror from their tyrants and co-religionists.

He was an abandoned cat, one who somehow ended up in the custody of the local Humane Society. That's where my daughter adopted him from, and she named him Tibby, a largish mostly grey feline, with a strange hanging pouch for an abdomen. That might have resulted from a condition relating to lack of adequate food. Once in my daughter's household, however, inadequate food was never a problem, although Tibby was always anxious before dinnertime, reminding my daughter that he needed, desperately, to eat.

This is a household of lots of domestic pets ranging from dogs to cats to rabbits, and even once, when my granddaughter was young, a little gerbil. Tibby never felt disadvantaged; he knew his place in the menagerie and tenaciously stuck to it, insisting on his entitlements. And when, on occasion, one or two or the rabbits was let out of their enclosure to just hop about wherever it pleased them, Tibby respected their security; he never posed a threat to them.

He did, however, pose a threat to the teeming wildlife around where my daughter lived, so Tibby became an 'inside' cat, never permitted out. And then my daughter relented, and put together a wire arrangement, a quite large affair, meant as well for any of the dogs who wanted to be out when she couldn't supervise them. That sufficed, apparently. Even so, if ever a chipmunk or a mouse managed somehow to get into the house, or a water snake in the spring, Tibby would pounce and my daughter rode to the rescue.

A dozen years later, Tibby is no more. My daughter moved with her household to another home, one which gave all the animals the same amount of acreage and the freedom to roam, as long as they were supervised. And Tibby, as usual, was permitted out into the confines of yet another large wire enclosure. Not that Tibby didn't resent the fact that the dogs could go out and he couldn't, to just kind of slop around the house. When the dogs, all ten of them, large and small, and mostly, like Tibby, rescues, were let out for pee-break, Tibby often tried to slip out with them, and sometimes succeeded.

Last Friday, which happened to be the 13th of November, he had managed somehow to slip out of the house without my daughter noticing. She was busy working, and heard what sounded like a vehicle braking. She has a fence across the front of her property, a heritage stone farmhouse, erected when she and her partner moved into their new home. In front of that fence is a highway and traffic can be fairly high at times.

She had a premonition. And called for Tibby, but there was no response from inside the house. Where he was supposed to be, of course. Then she went outside on that windy, pouring, cold day in early evening, and looked across at the highway, and just made out what looked like a small, limp form. And that's where she found Tibby.

Jackie places no credence nor value in the human-constructed concept of self-restraint. Why should he? He dances to the music he hears in his head and it leads him to the wild notion that nothing is out of bounds. Oh yes, he's now aware that what he's engaged in is invariably the kind of fun that will earn him a rebuke. Unlike Jillie, he takes those rebukes seriously. They just slip off Jilllie's conscience, she couldn't care less. On the other hand, Jillie doesn't indulge in the kind of destructive antics that Jackie does; at least not to the same degree.

These two preciously precocious little dogs are still in their puppy-stage, though they've passed their one-year mark of the approach to maturity. I suspect that they will never confess through their preoccupations that they've become adults. Puppyhood is just so much more interesting and to their tastes.

I remember when I was about six years of age how my own conscience worked. My family of parents and three children lived in a second-floor flat that consisted of a tiny kitchen, a large bedroom (parents' bed and a crib) and a smaller bedroom (another crib and a single bed), and a bathroom shared with the entire house. Another bedroom on the second floor was rented out to a bachelor. And the home owner, parents and two teen-age boys lived on the first floor, with a dog. They had a living room, a luxury unheard of among many immigrant families. In that living room was a lamp with an elaborate shade fringed with tiny hanging glass beads. Those beads fascinated me. I slipped unseen into the forbidden living room once, and tugged at one of those strings of glass beads and was immediately rewarded. It wasn't until a few of those strings were in my possession that the landlady noticed her lampshade had been cannibalized. She approached my mother, who questioned me, and of course I denied, denied, denied, no doubt a suitably hurt expression on my face.

Ah, a human child of six or so, lying, dissembling, avoiding the penalty for bad behaviour. So why fault a year-old little dog when he sneaks into a living room or a library, flips up the edge of a rug, and chews happily away at the underpad? Why wish to punish a little dog who finds the spines of books so enticing to chew? What's the purpose of scolding a raffish little fellow who sees someone tapping on buttons on a strange board, who later chews a few keys off the mini laptop that someone forgot to place out of harm's way? Beats me.

That's why we don't beat him with words of overheated anger only to see him retreat momentarily into a fug of puzzlement. He may know that what he's doing is forbidden because it's happened countless times before and the fruit of his disobedience has been our displeasure. But these opportunities to indulge in pleasurable activities appear irresistible to Jackie whom Jillie only occasionally accompanies in these illicit acts.

After all, you're only young once.

Just as with precocious and curious children always looking for ways to be stimulated by discovering something new, or behaving in a manner that adults deem to be destructive, our two puppies engage in random acts of delighted madness from time to time. These episodes are nowhere near as frequent as they once were; they are, after all, over a year in age now.

But when it's suddenly quiet in the house, then we go on the silent prowl to discover what's happening. And what's happening can be various things; our home library is one venue that has become a favourite retreat for Jack and Jill. We're a bookish family and they too find books appealing. For us it's the adventure contained within the covers of a book, the words transfixing us to new information, new experiences, new adventures. For them, it's the covers of a book that are transfixing, and particularly the spine. The more venerable the book, the more fragile the spine, lending itself to nibbling delight.

So, when we entered the library, there they were, their sharp hearing attuned to our silent approach, as they nonchalantly veered away from the bottom bookshelf and into a happy wrestling match for our entertainment. You might think that since there are two to entertain themselves through incessant bouts of mad runabouts through the house, their tiny paws slapping the carpeted and hardwood-bare floors upstairs resounding downstairs as though hippos had suddenly found themselves in a domesticated environment, they would have their fill of fun and games. You might think that our somewhat exhaustive daily explorations of the woodland ravine close by our house would suffice them for physical exercise, quite aside from the wild dashes they indulge in through the backyard.

But you might be wrong.

Their indomitable spirit of exhilaration experienced through new adventures incites them to explore new avenues constantly of stimulation. And their canny ability to dissemble, speaks to their high degree of intelligence. They know full well when they are indulging in forbidden exploits; their sheepish expressions when we come upon the scene of repeat misdeeds tells all. Regardless of our disapproval, they conspire together to repeat those performances, and when they're caught red-pawed, they simply amble off with an air of innocence.

This is their brave new world.

It's nothing short of amazing how quickly Jack and Jill grow their haircoats, looking dishevelled and unkempt, and prodding me to do something about it. They've never been taken to be professionally groomed, and nor were Button and Riley ever groomed by a professional. I simply use a number of various-sized scissors to trim their coats, and a specialized little blunt-nosed scissor to groom the insides of their ears so they don't get plugged.

Jack and Jill, though they're rambunctious little dogs, are fairly well behaved when I settle down to snip their hair. Jill never tries to intercede when I'm cutting Jackie's hair; she simply waits her turn, likely hoping I'll never get around to her. Jack on the other hand, is constantly present when Jillie's hair is being trimmed, to sniff around and lick her and me as well. As long as he isn't too disruptive I pay him little mind, and just allow him to do his gentle prodding.

Invariably, their hair gets cut on a Tuesday. And that's because Tuesdays are leisure days for me, when I don't have to do too much of anything. Mostly meal preparation, and earlier I'd made a large bowl of cole slaw that will accompany the meatballs-and-mushrooms-in-gravey-over-rice that I'm preparing for this cold day's dinner.

When the weather was balmy that haircutting task could be done out-of-doors and the resulting mess of black hair kept to a minimum. I do keep a bag handy to put the snipped hair into, but the area around where the cutting gets done eventually becomes littered with little blobs of hair. I usually rake up the hair once the cutting is completed, and pop it into the bag, then vacuum up the rest.

Of course, I will have vacuumed the house the day before, since Mondays happen to be house-cleaning day. It doesn't make all that much sense, I know, to clean the house assiduously one day and follow up the next day, snipping the hair of two little dogs who will shake all the loose hair that their brush hasn't caught and distribute it all over the house. But that's the way it's done in this house.

There's always the feeling of satisfaction when the job is done. And the pleasure taken in viewing how spiffy they look, afterward. And as it happened, after that was done we all got ready for a ravine walk. We found two little sweaters we'd  bought for them last winter and on they went.  It's a beautiful day, with full sun, but nippy and a light wind. We're not the only ones who considered this a perfect day for a ravine ramble; we came across many acquaintances doing just that.

In each of the four houses we've owned and lived in over the 60-year-time-frame of our marriage, my husband has left his individual mark, reflecting his very particular aesthetic. From our early 20s in the first modest semi-detached bungalow we lived in to the current house that is our home, and which incidentally is the house that we've lived in the longest, each of these places bore the reflection of my husband's tastes. And his ability to transform what they were -- bare husks of potential, into places that pleased us -- grew as his experience with first one then another gave him the opportunity to hone his skills and advance his more ambitious undertakings.

This is the house that reflects far more emphatically what those visions and his skills could accomplish. From the immense job of excavating by shovel a deep and wide and elongated area at the front of the house to expand gardens with the hardscape infrastructure of brick-laid and stone-lined patios and walkways incorporating gardens over a period of months one memorable spring, to his lining a second-story room openly overlooking the two-story-height foyer with native British Columbia lodge-pole pine and shelving for our own personal library, to transforming the height and breadth of most of the large windows of the house to stained-glass landscapes.

About fifteen years ago, when we'd lived in the house for a decade, he decided to tackle the kitchen, to rip out the existing floor tiles and replace them with ceramic tiles. That plan was expanded, just like most things my husband initially decides to do, to do the same with the laundry room, the hall between it, the kitchen and the powder room, and to include the powder room too in his plans. From deciding to replace the floor, to deconstructing the countertops in kitchen and powder room and deciding as well to include the breakfast room, re-building the countertops and tiling them too, and then tiling halfway up the walls in the powder room, the laundry room, the hallway, and the entire walls in the breakfast room, my husband had his work cut out for him for several years. But by then he was retired, and looking forward to the challenge.

He had started out his retirement years with a project to embark on a devotion to painting; for years he had dabbled in sketches, watercolours, oil paintings, and this new leisure time gave him the opportunity to express himself on canvass. And for the first several years he devoted himself to producing oil paintings, with credible and appreciated results. He veered off into designing stained-glass windows, and then producing those windows and then began building doors and building stained glass into the doors for various rooms of the house. Never a dull moment in this house.

When he finished replacing the carpeting in the upstairs hallways and rooms of the house with hardwood flooring, he looked at the bathrooms and decided they would be next. It was engaging entertainment shopping around for various kinds of tiles, ceramic and marble. And we chose a grey-and-pink-veined white marble tile for the bathroom off our bedroom, and my husband set to work in there as yet another project in the manner that kept occurring to him over the years. While he was preparing the floor, he decided the countertop also needed replacement, so ripped it out and rebuilt it, and the same with the tub surround. Then in the process of laying tile, he thought it would be a good idea to do all the walls, as well. We were extremely pleased with the results. And now that we've lived with them for the past fifteen years after completion of the job, we remain pleased.