I called at the perfect time she said. She was in her 'library', had just put on a record (from her trove of treasured old records), relaxing. Tired from cleaning up what is left of her vegetable garden. Her son had arrived hours earlier with a new contraption he had just acquired that would scoop up all the spent vegetation and woody matter, and chew it into compost. As for the drying leaves that had fallen, she had collected them manually, she said with satisfaction, for the compost, too. 

Her freezer was well stocked for winter, now, she told me. The zucchini grew huge this year, she couldn't keep up with them, and the beans are securely tucked into the freezer, so she'll have enough to use daily throughout the winter months. One of the tomato vines had borne odd but good-tasting tomatoes. She's a little tired, she admitted, and needs the rest. Not as spry as she once was, this 87-year-old woman, still living in the farmhouse outside Truro that she and her husband bought a half-century ago,with its 113-acreage and forest.

The sheep are gone, all sold this year and last and though she was sad to see them go, it meant much less work for her son whose house was built on the property, in waving distance from her own. Her daughter-in-law has been a godsend, doing all her banking and food shopping for her, driving her to her regular appointments for macular eye surgery in Halifax. Life is good, she feels well, and above all, fortunate.

One of her neighbours, several months younger than herself, had his vegetable garden completely destroyed by a flock of deer. And for the first time she had shared the bounty of her own garden with him, lifting him out of a disconsolate feeling of having produced nothing this year to put away. In the past it was he who had provided her with many of her starting plants, and she was happy to return the compliment, for him.

This is, one supposes, the modern-day-equivalent of the pioneer spirit. She sounds satisfied with life, the older of her two grandchildren will turn 22 tomorrow, and a birthday party is in the offing tomorrow, just the two grandchildren, their parents, their grandmother. Her 20-year-old granddaughter works at an open-air food market, selling home-baked bread. Over all, hangs the threat of COVID.

Well, I baked a cheesecake yesterday. A plain, easy-to-bake cheesecake, topped with a raspberry glaze. I used a half pint of fresh raspberries for the glaze. An excellent combination, rich with taste and (oops!) calories. And we enjoyed it last night after our chicken soup and rice, potato pudding, breaded baked chicken and roasted cauliflower. Jackie and Jillie appreciated it all as well, as they always do, offering to share our meals after they've had their own.

When we woke this morning it was bright and cool, very cool, but windless. The temperature last night flirted with frost, so it was just as well my husband had watered all the garden pots yesterday, ensuring the flowers would make it through without frost-burn, but it's only a matter of time, now. Since it was so cold we decided we'd have breakfast first today and later on head out to the ravine for our ramble through the forest with the puppies.

Bluejays were shrieking both in the ravine and at home from the cover of trees, the sound ear-piercing yet pleasing. And on the trails we saw that robins had once again gathered in little groups as they often do at this time of year, probably mostly juveniles, hopping about in the underbrush, flicking back and forth among the trees. Glancing into the forest interior we could see that some of the vines that creep up from tree trunk into branches above, have already turned bright red; likely Engleman's ivy.

And over at one area off the trail we had just ascended out of the ravine and into the forest plateau, there was a bright swatch of red autumn-transformed foliage of an ash tree that had managed to survive the collapse of the forest's ash population threatened by the Emerald Ash borer. Another area, and we encountered a long-dead ash, its bark steadily degrading under the influence of a colony of shelf fungi.

A beautiful day albeit cold, but then we're heading into a week of even cooler weather. Before more seasonable temperatures return, we hope. Last September at this time we were wallowing in 25C degrees, day after day. This has been a strange year on many counts, not the least of which has been the underlying concerns at the presence of a global pandemic alongside ample symbolic catastrophic incidents linked to climate change: devastating wildfires, flooding.

My son's mother-in-law is concerned that her province of Nova Scotia and neighbouring New Brunswick are in the path of an oncoming hurricane, set to strike around Tuesday evening. A similar harsh weather event had uprooted trees and destroyed many boats in the harbour last year at around the same time. There were homes that were destroyed as well. Our new realities.