I try to be alert, to respond quickly when I get an email from an old friend. They are few and far between. This one is someone who in our early teens and beyond into our twenties was someone whose friendship I valued yet took for granted. We knew one another originally from high school, then carried on our friendship when we had boyfriends. Both our then-boyfriends became our husbands. Mine still is, 65 years later; hers is long gone.

I never thought very positively about her boyfriend; too immature for my taste, but obviously not for hers. We moved away from Toronto and kind of lost touch over the years. Twenty years ago we connected again through my sister living in Toronto who met my old friend when they were both at a dance for seniors. Since then we've been emailing back and forth occasionally. We met up in Toronto again a few years back.

Her husband had left her when they had three small children. Left her for the younger baby sitter. She married again and outlasted her second husband. Her health is now impaired to the point where she gave one of her grandsons her car, and now she uses a walker to get around. I send her photos occasionally of our garden. Living in an apartment on her own, she has been cloistered for months. She is pensive and writes of memories of her youth. We live so differently, she and I. I feel quite badly for her.

Yesterday, I watched out our front door as thunder pealed overhead and lightning lit up the sky while rain pelted down, in the early evening. This has become a regular pattern over the past month or so. Late afternoon and evening thunderstorms, morphing into all-night rain events. This morning it felt warm and muggy, so we decided we'd take our little dogs out early to the ravine for our daily tramp through the woods.

The mosquitoes which were really irritating yesterday afternoon often seem less intrusive in early morning. The sky was absolutely clear of clouds, a beautifully intense blue. Just a light breeze prevailed and already the heat of the sun was pronounced. Though my husband took along water for Jackie and Jillie they were completely disinterested while we were out on the trails.

Everything was well and truly soaked. The sun was uncontested, however, piercing the leafy forest canopy to light up the forest floor in bright patches of illuminated green, and it wouldn't take long to completely dry the sopping vegetation. In the meantime, water glistened under the sun, generally brushed over everything, given that unending rain.

We were in no particular hurry, and just leisurely wended our way through a network of trails in one of our regular loops. Everywhere our eyes fell they alighted on bright pink thimbleberry flowers. It'll be a banner year for the fruit, flaunting their presence in mid- to late-summer. Passing under a group of wild apple trees we could see that some of their tiny emerging fruits had been discarded, lying disconsolately on the forest floor.

We watched briefly as a lone nuthatch made it way up and then down the trunk of a large old beech. They usually accompany flocks of chickadees but there didn't seem to be any around. It was only the nuthatch's rubber-ducky call that we heard, and only its busy little body we saw fixated on that tree.

We did a quick turn in the backyard before heading inside. Just to see how the gardens are faring in all this rain alternating with sun. A formula that couldn't be more finely tuned to give all vegetation a growth spur at the worst of times. And the worst of times is what we're mired in, waiting for some miracle to deliver the world from the clutches of a dreadful zoonotic that has so far affected ten million people globally, taking the lives of close to a half-million people through its dread effects on the respiratory system of its victims.