Sunday breakfast takes a while to prepare. Starting with orange juice, followed by melons and bananas. It's the French toast and accompanying sausages that take time to prepare. Jackie and Jillie have their breakfast while I'm working at the stove, dipping challah into egg beaten with milk and placed in a buttered fry pan. They can smell the toast and know they're in line for special treats this morning.

Another warm, but not hot day, beckoning us outdoors for garden work. One of us responded, and it wasn't me. And though the temperature at 25C was the same as yesterday's, today's cloudy intervals mediated the sun's glare so it seemed nowhere near as hot as yesterday. In short, a perfect day for doing garden work.

It takes a while to water the garden and the garden pots, and though I meant to do the pots yesterday time got away on me and it didn't get done. So that's what Irving started out with. And when he finished the watering after breakfast he set himself the task of continuing pruning trees in the backyard. Today it was the Corkscrew Hazel, and the Magnolia.

We're hoping the Hazel will survive. Its curly-wound-about top branches failed once again to bear foliage. The result of the tiny green predators -- Japanese beetles that had tormented it for the past several years. The lower portion of the tree did put out a good crop of leaves. So that part was left and the top lopped off. I had begun the process yesterday, but barely started it. Irving completed the job; time-consuming and finicky. Then came the less tedious job of trimming branches on the Magnolia. A few are interfering with the territory assigned to the Purple Smoke tree.

Cutting everything into manageable-sized pieces takes time, too, and it isn't long before those giant garden compost bags fill up. Even with clouds shielding from the sun in the backyard, the work is energy-intensive and heat-inducing.

Finally, I've finished my indoor chores of laundering linen, deep-cleaning the kitchen and the bathrooms and Jackie and Jillie begin agitating for our afternoon ravine hike. They've been outside now and again with Irving, but prefer being indoors if they're not actively engaged. Once in the ravine and making our way through the forest trails under the shade of the forest canopy, we feel refreshed, with our energy restored.

At one point, we run into one of our neighbours whose house is located at the foot of  the street, out with her dog and her sister and her dog. Her sister, a retired dentist who spends her summers usually in Mexico where they bought a property, lives nearby. The two women engage us in conversation, mostly focusing on Justin Trudeau and his Liberal government.

Susan gets really carried away in her tirades against Canada's prime minister. I only thought I detested the man, she does to a degree that surpasses my own feelings to a substantial margin. Irving speaks mainly with Gayle, while I'm in the direct line of Susan's list of the man's inept, autocratic, ill-advised and nation-destructive moves.

The range is wide, from broken promises to higher taxes, new fertilizer constraints for farmers, absorption of illegal migrants, insultingly false feminism, Quebec favouritism at a cost to the rest of Canada, Western Canadian disillusion, oil exploration and pipeline shutdowns, pandemic mandates, demonizing and harassing Canadians who dissent, and on and on. It's not that we don't agree with these complaints, we do. It's just that their intensity and anger takes us slightly aback.

Finally, we're able to break away, in the realization that we've been standing in the same spot for a half-hour and the puppies are restless. The two women whom we've known for decades are both wearing shorts. We're not, so it was they who were being relentlessly mosquitoed. Still, it was uncomfortable standing there for so long, kvetching and wondering why our fellow Canadians seem oblivious to the assault on our democracy when the prime minister of the country labels those disagreeing with him as 'racist', 'homophobic' and ignorant.

Before we leave the interior trails to descend from the spine of the ravine toward the creek, the sun returns and the air becomes more heated. We see a shadow and it's that of a butterfly, so we look upward to try to find the insect, and when we finally spot it settling on a leaf, we've seen the first Monarch butterfly made visible to us this year. Beautiful creatures that are in sad decline. The only thing we could think of at the moment that wasn't Trudeau's fault.