We check in morning and night on the daily news. It's of immense importance to know what is happening in the world. From strictly local to international stories that alert and inform. And cause no little amount of despair that the global community is taxed evidently beyond its capacity to manage to live together with even a begrudged bit of tolerance. News today out of Afghanistan is compellingly terrifying, that people who want to live their lives in as normal a manner as possible, face ongoing violence that supposedly theist-sodden thugs impose upon them.

 

One of the major tenets of civilization is to take note of others' distress, become involved, make an effort to help them. Efforts that can often go horribly wrong, and sometimes manage despite wholesale adversity to go right. The Afghan tragedy is a bit of both, but in this instance the the helpfulness was sandwiched between 'horribly wrong'. The wild destructiveness of religious zealots whose fundamentalist idealism of a religion they claim based on sacred texts is entitled to slaughter non-believers in the imperative to bring the world to worship the ultimate creator can convince one of the evil that lives in the heart of human savagery.

 

And yet, we have the great good fortune to be removed from this chaotic turmoil, pain and terror. That divide between the threats faced by people whose misfortune it is to live in geographic areas afflicted by such terror and our own staid, civilized lifestyle, gives an aura of unreality to all of the reports coming fast and furious out of Afghanistan. Reading them, you grit your teeth in disbelief.

 

And then your attention turns to your own life and its normalcy. Where serenity reigns supreme. We all have problems that we face on a daily basis; concerns from merely irritating events up to critical life decisions that must be made. But few on this side of the world face the unrelenting, ongoing crises that the Islamic world has brought upon itself, and by extension the larger world.

 

Today, routine for us represents the mind-calming antidote to the dreaded, dreadful news of futures stolen and lives lost. We paused at the sight of the vast colony of bright pink flower heads held aloft to the sun as we approached the forested ravine we visit daily with our little dogs Jackie and Jillie, with a palpable sense of relief. An escape from newspapers and stories of disaster, and for us on our much more modest scale of concerns, escape from an afternoon of humid heat reaching into the 32C mark.

 

The neighbour on the street behind ours has continued to harvest those large, beautiful red, ripe apples from his backyard apple trees, to cart them by wheelbarrow into the ravine where he tips the barrow and they descend onto the hillsides below. The pile has grown substantially. It  sits there, a rebuke to a nation with a surfeit of food as opposed to other nations where ample food supplies are but a dream.

The berries that Irving has been plucking along the trails for Jackie and Jillie are just about exhausted. But the wild apple trees that have grown in a thicket of their own, continue to offer various types of fresh, ripe apples. So we have our pick, as it were, of apples. Some taste like Mackintoshes, some like transparents, and they're mostly quite good. Some quite outstandingly good; sweet, crisp and juicy. And Jackie and Jillie are more than willing to share them with us. And we munched as we toddle along.

 

When we traverse the vanishingly narrow pathway after our hour's tramp through the forest trails, to get to the meadow before leaving the forest, grasshoppers scatter left and right as we push our way through the narrow passage crowded with grasses whose height reaches our own and more. The diminishing presence of wildflowers hasn't dampened the enthusiasm of the pollinators; bees are everywhere extracting nectar and pollen from those flowers whose days are numbered, moving into fall.

 

 

I've been so fed up with how messy everything looks in the garden, but refrained from going out to work there in the heat of the afternoon while we're still marooned in this heat wave. Yesterday afternoon out I went, to cut back spent perennials and tidy things up in the garden. Irving, despite my protests, mowed the grass front and back in that heat.

 

And today out I was again in the sweltering direct sun, sweeping up detritus on the walkways, scraping up obnoxious little weeds and doing additional cut-backs, before turning to watering the gardens and the garden pots. The constant overheated wind, the glare of the sun and hot temperatures have fatigued the garden, and I know just how it feels. Irving was continuing his woodwork painting in the kitchen, and I was finished outside long before he was done, inside. Busy days.