After a while you become accustomed to anything, incorporate it into the reality of your life and just get on with things. Most people do. I'd have to exclude our direct neighbour to our left. The man of the household avoids social contact as though his life depends on it, and always has. We've lived next to them for the past 30 years; he's the most socially introverted person we've ever come across. We value our personal privacy, but we've never shied away from greeting people, meeting people, spending time with people.

Their daughter was just newly born when we moved into our house, next to theirs. She's an independent adult now, has long since moved away to live on her own. When, on the rare occasion she visits with her boyfriend, neither are permitted to enter the house. Winter or summer they must stand outside on the porch, raise their voices, and exchange brief greetings. His elderly sister, quite a bit older than he who lives in a care home, sat outside on a chair in front of their porch today, for she too was not permitted to enter the house after her brother picked her up for a visit.

Irving will speak jocularly to strangers, stopping the car momentarily to pass a few quips when he sees someone walking a puppy along a street. When we did the shopping today it reminded me, because we'd gone out late in the afternoon, of how we managed the food shopping in the pre-vaccination days of the pandemic. Venturing out just as the supermarket opened and shopping while it was mostly empty to avoid potential contact with COVID carriers.

Today, though most people are vaccinated and the daily case numbers have plunged, case numbers fluctuate back and forth, and it is mostly the unvaccinated who feature in large numbers among the infected. But we've returned to our normal pattern of shopping, going out when it's more convenient, shopping amongst other masked and distance-respecting people gathering their food for the week.

We had earlier gone out with Jackie and Jillie for a circuit of the forest trails on a beautiful, warmish-cool late summer Tuesday. Gentle breeze, blue sky, a bright day in contrast to the heavily overcast day yesterday turned out to be for Labour Day, with plenty of rain. No sign of yesterday's on-and-off-again rain in the forest today, however. The trails were dry, and the screen of the leaf mass was a vibrant green. 

We've noted for a while the spectacle of growing piles of sawdust under certain trees and fallen trunks alongside the forest trails. Symptoms of carpenter ants busy doing what carpenter ants do. Nature's unerring blueprint of death and renewal. Hollow trees that are ailing, hosting nests of ants who take their job seriously. Others nesting in or nearby dead trees, equally devoted to the task nature set out for them; the growing sawdust piles testament to their gradual and inexorable helping hand in decay whose end-matter becomes the nursing base for new growth.

When we're passing along the forest trails, we train our eyes everywhere; on the ground, straight ahead, and above the tree line. Looking at the forest floor you don't tend to miss seasonal flowering wildflowers, small creatures, from beetles and bugs to bustling chipmunks and squirrels. Straight ahead, the dragonflies and bees that veer here and there among the vegetation. Raising eyes higher, the looping flight of warblers, and the upended creep of nuthatches on tree trunks. Higher still, and you note the presence of wasp nests and wind-cracked tree trunks.

We saw one today, a large old poplar that had split about fifteen feet from the ground, the upper, longer portion of the trunk fallen on the supportive trunks and branches of surrounding trees, stopping the broken trunk from falling to the ground. It sits there now, perched directly over the trail. When and if it falls it will create quite the impact, with sound to match. Because of the height at which the tree cracked it would take an experienced arborist to remove the threat it represents.