Today is his birthday, January 20th. The youngest of my mother's four children. He was born 13 years after me. He was a year old when I met a boy with whom I became fast friends, and who would, four  years later, become my husband. He had retired as a professor of botany only a year earlier. He lived a fairly healthy lifestyle, a vegetarian, an active outdoorsman, an avid natural gardener, and a dedicated birder. He loved an energetic game of squash. By the time his cancer was discovered it had already metastasized and he went directly into a therapeutic state of palliative care.

There are certain things I do routinely that always cause me to pause and think of his absence. Brief times of memory, recollection of long past events, tinges of sorrow at the realities of life. And then we push on. 

Life demands attention. And we respond accordingly. Both the routines and the items that are not quite routine, some of which have an extraordinary irritant factor. Like, for example, filling out official online forms that invariably are more complex than they need to be. Finicky, at the very least; the need for which is understandable, but no less irritating because of that.

The city of Ottawa, in its search to discover more available housing in a Canada-wide atmosphere of housing shortages, people seeking housing and discovering that the purchase price of both new and existing homes have become well beyond their means to even consider, allied to the fact that the federal government has seen fit to outdistance all other G7 countries in their intake of refugees, migrants, immigrants and foreign students badly exacerbating the problem.

Rental apartments are far too few and far too expensive. Dwellings of any kind in major Canadian cities have become impossible to find for young people hoping to begin raising a family, let alone immigrants arriving to find themselves unable to access decent living accommodations. So the municipality has decided that all its property-tax-paying residents must annually fill out a firm attesting to the fact that they actually occupy the unit/home they pay taxes on. Any homes deemed not lived in are taxed an additional hefty sum, as though this is a measure that will solve anything.

And then there are the habitual measures we take as a tight little family to make the most of our natural environment and our need to delve into its environs for the sake of our mental and physical health. The level of pleasure derived from our daily expeditions into a nearby forest is often measurable by the state of the weather. We're now in a January cold-snap, where icy winds and low temperatures can make  trekking forest trails a mite uncomfortable.

On the positive side, however, the shimmering beauty of a snowy forest in the midst of winter, with new falling snow under a sky crowded with pewter-coloured clouds transports the mind to a winter pleasure dome. Jackie and Jillie, our two little poodles, most certainly agree. They have a tendency to exert themselves with a passion for life, rushing uphill and down, pausing for us to join them, and fully integrating themselves into the forest atmosphere of freedom and beauty.