The hospital employs vigorous young men to organize their overcrowded parking lot and act as valets. When you enter, you stop the car, lean over to take a ticket, wait for the gate to lift, then drive through aisle after aisle in the parking lot in a vain effort to find a parking spot. They're all occupied. There are cars in front of you, cars behind you, all searching for that elusive spot. On occasion someone leaves and then the vehicle most fortunate to be closest to the emptying spot takes it. A victory!

You're approached by one of the helpful young men who either tells you where you can look elsewhere in the lot or drive nearby to an overflow lot and hope to have better luck there. Or he can take your keys as you give him verbal permission to park -- which is to say, double-park, in the lanes not a parking spot but directly behind parked cars, alongside the myriad of others -- and you're free to enter the hospital for your appointment. On your return you show any of the busy young men in the lot the slip you've been given so they can retrieve your vehicle for you, or show you where it has ended up. They're very genial, very helpful.

We had some luck. We'd driven down a few of the aisles and quickly ascertained with the coming and going and mounting numbers of vehicles being placed alongside parked cars that the system was seriously overloaded yesterday morning, when lo and behold, there was a van backing up, and out and since we were most directly adjacent it awaiting just such an opportunity, took it.

Earlier, before we left the house, Jackie and Jillie in their mysterious way knew something was afoot and we'd be leaving them alone in the house, after their breakfast. Ours would await our return. It hardly matters whether we're away ten minutes or ten hours, their heartbreak at abandonment is the same. And on our return a passionately emotional greeting awaits us. I had an appointment at the Eye Clinic to see the ophthalmologist who had last operated on my left eye. It was just common cataract surgery for an aging population and it's handled in our universal health-care system like a well-geared industry.

When we returned home, not all that much time having elapsed between our leaving and our return, we had breakfast, sharing our breakfast with our heart-mended companions. And then we left for the ravine. It was cold still, -6C, with wind, alternating between sun and overcast with a few snow sprinkles added for good measure.

Hiking through the ravine is a sure-fire method of restoring one's emotional equilibrium. You set aside the disturbing things you've seen, experienced and felt move you, to focus on the landscape surrounding you. The snow, newly enhanced with large, fat new flakes, the unevenness of the trail requiring a modicum of attention, the antics of your two little dogs as they proceed before you and the background overall of the winter forest.

Wending our way through the forest trails we come across an unending series of variant points of interest, each highlighting in their own way something different than the others before them. We're familiar with them all, after the time that has passed when we made our first pioneering pass through the forest trails, marvelling at the experience. And although we're familiar with them, there's most often something different distinguishing each of these disparate sites from day to day so that we never stop marvelling at seasonal nature's presentations.

Each of the clinics at the hospital teems with people requiring special attention for their medical conditions; chronic or newly diagnosed and transitory. The hospital corridors are full of doctors, nurses, technicians, going back and forth in their timeless work to help the health-afflicted, and that's reassuring. It's the sight of the infirm, the feeble, the hesitant elderly, the puzzled younger contingent, the frail-vulnerable in wheelchairs and those whose osteoporosis curvature signals the Old Crone syndrome that confronts one's consciousness into a mild state of awareness and depression. You are there, not necessarily where you'd prefer to be, but because your own health mandates it.

Out in the forest with Jackie and Jillie we are provided with relief from the spectacle we left behind us. We may comment on our impressions and our resulting emotions, but briefly, turning our attention instead -- and restoratively -- to the landscape surrounding us, comforting us.