Yesterday was a dark news day and a dark weather day. A combination none too positive for anyone's state of agitated mental health. Copious rain poured down from three in the afternoon, and the house interior was really dark. I'm not a telephone conversationalist, avoiding speaking on the telephone whenever I can. But yesterday I felt like 'reaching out', and called one of our neighbours down the street who has lived alone since  his wife left him over his roving eye. He's been a really good neighbour to us.

I called to ask how he is, how he's managing. He's an avid world traveller; not much else to do with your life if you're alone and have the finances to enable leisure travel. Earlier in the month he returned from a trip to Cambodia and VietNam and he said he loved it. He self-isolated on his return, and his ex-wife, who has happily re-married did grocery shopping for him, leaving it in boxes for him to retrieve from the porch.

I called our daughter-in-law's mother, now in her late 80s, and living alone in an old farmhouse she and her husband bought many years ago outside Truro, Nova Scotia. She has been in seclusion, dependent on her son's wife to supply her with groceries, since they live next door, on a rural property. She's using an old record player, she told me, and playing, one by one the hundreds of old records they had collected over the years. Her vision is too heavily compromised now for her -- a lifelong reader -- to read books any longer. She's cheerful of necessity.

And then I called my younger sister, who still hasn't been informed of the endoscopy and colonoscopy test results from last week. She and her husband, who sold their house to move into an apartment complex in north-end Toronto, went shopping earlier in the week, and waited in a long line outside the supermarket until guards allowed them to enter -- only two people at a time, and only once two shoppers had exited.

This morning I baked a banana cake. My husband and I love bananas and have one each every morning, along with an orange or part of a melon. But I don't particularly care for anything baked with bananas, and my husband does. For a change I thought I'd relent, and a banana cake it was. I'd prepared a crumble topping, but decided when I turned the cake out of the baking pan, to leave it upside down, so the crumble topping ended up underneath.

We ventured out to the ravine under a wide, blue sky and sparkling-bright-warm sun coasting along the cloudless sea of blue. With a high of 8C we were hoping that the widespread icy conditions on the forest trails would have improved, despite all the rain. And as it transpired, most of the ice on the trails was soft, our cleats giving us a good grip on the ascents and descents where we're most likely to slip. A more beautiful day weatherwise couldn't have been expressly ordered to cheer us up.

The few people we did see were easy enough to acknowledge, then leave a good distance between as we passed. We met up with our old friend Max, and standing a wide measure from one another, we discussed the state of the world we live in today, and Jackie and Jillie patiently waited. Our various experiences doing the grocery shopping were expressed and parsed. It's a topic of conversation uppermost in everyone's mind, crowding out all other concerns, and will continue to do so for a good long time, we are advised.