A hand-crafted birthday card arrived this afternoon from our oldest son for his father's 86th birthday. Irving began a tradition when our children were quite young, of drawing amusing birthday cards for all of us on those special days. Our oldest son appears to have inherited his father's gift for sketching and his cartoons display a wit even more piquant at times than his father's. A flash of a brilliant inheritance.

 

All three of our children bear that distinguishing aesthetic flash in their own way. From interior design to furniture construction, drawing credibly life-like renditions of reality, throwing pottery, a love of nature, astronomy, they all reflect in some part their father's legacy of originality and artistic passion. 

 

 

Jackie and Jillie have a sharpened sense of the fundamentals of life as well, possibly through keen observation patterning them to appreciate life at its most organic level which accounts for their passionate devotion to food.😜😜 Something tells me, though, that this is a reflection of existence at its base, a penetrating sense of survival, one shared by all living creatures. 😇

 

Irving braved  high winds, extreme cold and windy conditions to drive over to the branch of the public library closest to us. To return an overdue video, and to nose about in the newly re-opened 'Friends of the Library' shop next to the library, where de-acquisitioned books and donated books crowd shelves waiting for the opportunity to enrich someone's home library. Irving loves the opportunity to be that 'someone'. 

 

He came home with another book by Richard Dawkins, another biography of Charles Darwin, a large-format picture book featuring Canada's Group of Seven's Tom Thomson, a compilation of writing by war correspondents, and two books, one a novel the other short stories, by Yukio Mishima. I have an ambition to some day read every one of the books on the groaning shelves of our home library.

 

When he returned he said the weather was dreadful, the wind whipping snow directly into his face, howling through the atmosphere on a day considerably colder than we've had in weeks. So, should we go out for our usual trek through the forest trails with Jackie and Jillie, or should we set that aside for the day? I knew the answer when Irving began filling his cookie pouch in preparation for a hike.

 

On with their heavier winter jackets for Jackie and Jillie; we'd venture out in the expectation that shelter from the forest canopy would look after the most ferocious wind gusts. And in fact, it did, and it hardly felt colder today than it had yesterday although there was a notable differential, from 4-degrees Celsius of yesterday to the -8C that we were presented with today.

 

The tree canopy, catching most of the snow that drifted down also lessened the opacity of the atmosphere, just as it diminished the force of the wind. As for the colder temperature, we had bundled ourselves so well, I almost felt mummified in the layers under my heaviest winter jacket. Excellent footing saw us ascend and descend hills with a minimum of effort/ Jackie and Jillie bounced about happily, leaping ahead of us, delighted with their snow-filled adventure.