We've been using facial tissues like nobody's business, not that anyone would want to know. We haven't had colds in years, either of us, but come the winter months those facial tissues are indispensable. (A factor of age, weather and the effect of medications.) And we go through them at an alarming rate. Such luxury, to be using a tissue and discarding it and plucking another then another out of the box; it seems inexhaustible. And we go through box after box. Certainly beats washing handkerchiefs.

 When I was a child close to a century ago -- yes, that long, say up to the time when I was 8 years of age, which would be 75 years ago -- a roomer in the house where my parents rented a flat consisting of a tiny kitchen and two bedrooms, and everyone shared a bathroom, the home owners, my parents and their then-three children and the single man who lived in the front bedroom -- he once casually asked me if I'd like to have the Kleenex box he was discarding.

I was delighted, a coloured box and I could have it. Notably, I had few toys of my own, and the cardboard box took on the aspect of a treasure. I'd had the mistaken impression that it wasn't empty and it would be all my own. I dreamed how wonderful it would be to have that box intact with the tissues still in it. Wouldn't that be something to have. Of course I wouldn't use the tissues, just proudly own them, my very own. 

Now, I have all the tissues I need for practical purposes, and more. Strange, the associations we make in our memory, connecting the past with the present.

We missed our ravine walk yesterday. Just too cold, windy and cold and windy and cold and windy and we thought we'd give it a pass. Today, though a busy day, out we went. The morning temperature of =21C had warmed up to -12C in the ravine by mid-afternoon and out we went. The sun is so hot now in its graduation from early to mid- to late winter it sits  at a different angle in the sky and we can recognize longer daylight hours and a warming sun. So warm that though the temperature is well below freezing, the sun's rays melt the snow on the metal canopy over our deck. Drip, drip, drip, leaving of course frozen water which is to say, ice, on the floor of the deck.

The sun's warmth goes quite a way to ameliorating the extreme cold. The creek at the bottom of the ravine is now thoroughly frozen over. We watched this afternoon as a German Shepherd seemed quite puzzled enthusiastically racing down the bank to reach the creek then seemingly disconsolate that it had disappeared. Not the least bit impressed that he could now walk on water, he obviously wanted to wade into water.

The blaze of the sun in the wide blue ocean of sky is mesmerizing when viewed through the screen of the forest trees, or seeing the canopy lit up in a living orange, caressed by the sun. We would be as nothing without the presence of the sun. It brings and it sustains life. And right now it is slowly but in steady increments lengthening daylight hours and warming this cold winter atmosphere.