It's an elderly single-shot 22 rifle, with nostalgic properties accounting for the sole reason it is still in our possession. We had gone together when we were 16 or 17 to a sports shop somewhere in Toronto and chosen it. It cannot have cost us more than $25 at the time, as an impulse purchase. My husband was an urbanite, but a country boy, a farmer at heart. He lived in Toronto, was born in Toronto and that's where we met, but he spent his growing years as a young boy and a teen during summer months helping out on his uncle's farm. Fond memories, he has aplenty.

And he used often to take me with him later in his older teen years to visit with his aunt and uncle, long after their own four sons had departed the farm for urban life. He showed me what would happen if you put a penny on the train track that ran through a part of the farm. I watched as he fished occasionally from the bank of the Little Humber river. We were chased once through a pasture by a small, enraged group of cows, unhappy at our presence and clambered over a fence in record time. His uncle scoffed at the very notion that his cows would chase anyone.

The old farmhouse was large, many-roomed, with a handy summer kitchen containing a second cook stove where it was cooler during the summer months to prepare meals for a large family. A large rambling place for two people getting on in years, I thought. We are now far older than they were, back then.

My husband's aunt loved indoor plants and she gave me cuttings to grow myself at a time in my life when I was just beginning to become interested myself.  My husband recalls his uncle with great fondness. His uncle dabbled in a kind of horticulture himself, grafting branches from a pear tree onto an apple tree and finding some success in the process.

The rifle in our possession? Odd, that, other than to say there was nothing, no facet of life or its many objects that didn't attract his attention. So we had this rifle and he taught me how to shoot, and we would indulge, off in one field or another, in target shooting. Inanimate objects. Once, my husband aimed at a bird sitting on a fence post and to his dismay and chagrin, hit it dead on. That dead-on hit resulting in a limp little form ensured we would never again take out that rifle. But it has remained in our possession over the past sixty years and more.

We had a reminder from the RCMP that our license was up for renewal. All firearms had to be registered and licensed as an initiative taken by a previous Liberal-led government after the dreadful mass shooting that took place at the Ecole Polytechnique in Montreal in 1989 when a demented misogynist shot to death 14 women enrolled there, and wounded fourteen other students in a horrific 20-minute rampage of deadly intent.

So this morning, I endured the rigmarole of going on line to renew our registration.