Habit is when something becomes so deeply ingrained through repetitive experience that you don't give it any further thought, you just do, think, expect and feel how experience has accustomed you to. One of nature's devices to give sentient creatures opportunities to set aside deep thought and just react in the most visceral of ways; rinse and repeat.

It's been a quarter century since we both retired from active paid employment. Yet like everyone else we're geared to anticipate the weekend. Which is rather amusing since if we're going to do anything like shopping as an example, we avoid the weekends, since that's when working people do their shopping errands. Still, the prospect of an oncoming weekend resonates in our consciousness as a time free from work, a time to relax, a time of our own.

 

Needless to say, no one 'relaxes' on the weekend, not exactly. All the chores from shopping to laundry and cleaning, difficult to catch up with throughout a working week await, and somehow everything is shoehorned into Saturday and Sunday. Granted, most people, as we certainly did, find the time to still treat themselves to an outing of some kind. For some, it's a movie, watch some organized sport, for others it's incidental shopping, hairdressing appointments, for others it's getting out in the great outdoors.

 

Lucky us, we're able to do all those things and more (minus the movie, and sports and incidental shopping and hairdressers) at any time, because our time is literally our own. Stretching out in comfort still in bed this morning, thoughts of leisure and relaxing are reminiscent of the time when our weekends were preserved for as much of both as we could manage, which wasn't much, in actual fact.

 

A lovely day greeted us, a not-unreasonable temperature heading to 25C, with wide blue skies and warm, bright sun. So, to the garden we went. Lots to do. One of our oldest rose shrubs has grown to an impressive height, and this year there are more thick canes than ever, though I tend to discard some in the fall. It became so heavy with an embarrassment of blooms the canes leaned over precariously, though the main plant has long been fastened more or less to a wrought-iron stand.

 

 

My husband hammered a steel rod behind the rose, and with nice thick leather/rubber gloves we managed to tackle the shrub and pull it back to a good upright position freeing other plants from its oppressive sprawl. That done, we turned our attention to the weeping Jade which had developed over the years arching branches extending its reach into a nearby Japanese yew and Sunrise maple. Setting up an aluminum workbench, up we went for height, and with a pair of long-handled loppers off came those far-reaching branches.

 

Eventually we got around to taking Jackie and Jillie out for their afternoon ravine trek through the forest trails. They were so well behaved while we were working at the front of the house, remaining with us, never taking advantage to go on little trips off our property, they needed rewarding, so we took along treats for them aside from their water bottle.

 

Yesterday was the official re-opening of the province to 'normalcy'. Stay-at-home orders lifted. Retail establishments open. So, needless to say, with the opportunities open to people to visit bars and restaurants' outdoor patios, and shop 'till they drop, there were scant few other people and dogs out rambling around the forest trails.

 

The daisies are now in bloom wherever there's good sun penetration, and that's mostly around the banks of the ravine's creek. And the thimbleberry shrubs have all attained a good size now, actively sporting their bright pink flowers to be transformed into berries by late summer. For the first time in a while, we spent our hour-and-a-leisure-half rambling about in comfort, the tree canopy shading us, a light breeze cooling the atmosphere, everything bright and green, arriving back home still fresh feeling, hot overheated as we were feeling in the spate of 30C weather that preceded the weekend.