So, it's December, the month when my sister and I will be congratulating one another on reaching another age milestone. Both born toward the end of December, two days and four years apart. Five years ago our younger brother died. It just doesn't seem possible. His birthday was the 20th of January. Our mother and our other brother were both born in May. No one ever knew when my father was born, least of all himself. So that when he died he was somewhere around his early 50s. What a train of thought.

December is the month that completes another year. And in the religious calendar of the Western Hemisphere a month that commemorates a birth of a Jewish child whose legend became a world focus on the divine. A piquant reminder that though that legendary figure is the single most influential one in the world transcending time and the appearance of other singular personages, the people from whom that child arose continue to suffer unending expressions of contemptuous hatred from the wider community.

The sacrifice of a single, exemplary human being to the hope of transforming humanity into a far better brood than they are has never resulted in the revolution of the human character divinely articulated, for humanity in the aggregate is not agreeable to disciplining its darker emotions. The sacrifice of a people during one of history's bleak periods of collective psychopathy where six million were annihilated has never resulted in a lasting recognition of humankind's capacity to err.

We move from the macrocosm of world events to the microcosm of a global pandemic affecting a single family's life, the dire consequences of a virus moving steadily to strike down those innocent of rancid action toward others striking fear and introspection into the minds of others. Moving people to restrain their impulses for social contact, and to practise newborn habits once thought unthinkable.

In a pivot from the sacred to the ordinary, this household of two adults and two little dogs looks forward to colder winter temperatures, just cold enough to ensure that snow will descend in place of rain. Winter and rain in this geography don't mix very well, all the more so when a great natural setting of an urban forest is involved. The two days of steady rain we've just gone through has resulted in returning us once again to a landscape of dark, bleak late fall. A landscape that had been relieved by the refreshing aesthetic effect of two days of snow.

Although today is overcast and dark, it is also fixed at the freezing point, despite which the forest trails in the ravine remain thick with muck, slick and dark and supremely unattractive. There was precipitation that came down in the form of light flurries from time to time, welcomed as long as it wasn't rain. The creek at the bottom of the ravine is swollen with rainwater and melted snow. The forest floor is almost completely relieved of its initial snowpack.

But we found nothing to hinder us in our determination to get out into the ravine and the forest to celebrate another day of life lived to its fullest. Jackie and Jillie seem to seek out little plots of still-present snow preferentially as though they're puzzled by its swift disappearance and value what they can find that has remained. As we moved steadily through the trails, doing our best to evade the portions of trail steeped deep in mud, light flurries descended now and again.

Just as we were rounding the last bit of trail to make an abrupt turn right, descending the spine of the forest once again, we saw the bright flash of sun rays glancing off a pool of meltwater on the forest floor, fiery light amidst the gloom of the trees bereft of their green. For little more than a split second the sun had dodged the cloud cover, which quickly closed in again and shut out the light.