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.

From the time we were children together, just into our teens, books were always an important part of our lives. We'd go together to municipal library branches in walking distance. We would discuss book contents. We would read many of the same books. Eventually, still 'children', at the age of 18 when we married, we joined a book-of-the-month club where monthly we'd be sent a handful of books through the mail, return those of no interest and pay a nominal $1 each for those kept. There were few returned, and we barely managed to pay for the books. At that time $2,500 represented a year's salary.

Since the coronavirus erupted and interrupted all phases of human existence we haven't returned to our local public library. But over the years in 67 years of marriage we acquired books and have a sizeable collection of those we couldn't bear to part with. A few years ago Irving collected hundreds and hundreds of paperbacks off our library shelves, boxed them, and delivered them to our local Salvation Army second-hand store. That thinned the number of books, but ample numbers remained.

Many of which neither of us has yet read, but fully intend to. Bit by bit we get around to reading, and in some instances, re-reading books of all kinds from biographies, histories, novels, travel books, autobiographies, adventure stories. Among the publications we amassed over the years is a collection of hard-covered Harper's magazines, compiled year-by-year. Occasionally, Irving likes to go through them. The print size is too much of a struggle for me.

There are many fascinating stories, reports, autobiographical accounts in these collections dating from the mid-1800s onward. Stories that were current to their day, but now regarded as 'ancient' history.  Accounts of what was common in society of the time that may clang in our ears now, or arouse amazement because though well over a century has passed, some things appear current and others incredibly prescient. 

There is little that is more comfortably satisfying than thumbing through literature in front of a warming fireplace on cold winter days. Fascinating articles that capture the imagination and fire thought processes then become topics of lively conversations. But we do eventually break ourselves away from the warmth of the fireplace and the fascination of the books to take to the out-of-doors daily with our two little dogs.

It's been heavily overcast all day today, yet another dark, damp winter day. Leaving the house at three to set out for our hike through the forest trails, usually means we'll be back home by five. Around half-past three, we're aware that dusk is on the cusp of entering the landscape, and a half hour later a veil of grey is full established. Brightened considerably by the snow-packed forest floor.

The landscape is actually like a winter sandwich; above is the top layer of silvery white, below the bottom layer, and all that lives moves about between. On the upper reaches of the ravined forest we can often see in the distance the orange glow of the sun beyond the cloud cover, settling on the horizon. It's a difficult glow to capture with a camera, though the camera of our eyes experience no difficulty.