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.

 

I grew up with an awareness that may have been unusual in a small child. Seared into my subconscious, everpresent in my thoughts now are the ghastly events and details of the Holocaust. It was an ongoing atrocity in my childhood, my ears picking up whispered conversations between my parents, my parents and their friends. As an aware child I read books about Jewish tribulations. Antisemitism is a word I wasn't aware of, but the very act itself was familiar to me. I dimly recall asking my father why I was called a Christ-killer and a dirty Jew. As I grew older, I ravenously read accounts of the Holocaust.

 

Fifty years ago when our children were young, just reaching their teen years, we happened to be in one of those indoor malls popular during that era, built underground as a kind of basement adjunct-enterprise to downtown buildings. There were wide-open spaces brilliantly lit, with no natural light, but which drew people in Ottawa's summer heat and brutal winters to shop at boutique-like specialty shops. While there, a young girl approached me and asked in heavily-accented English where she could buy yoghurt.

 

A brief conversation ensued, and she revealed that she was 17 years old, back-packing through Canada, a German citizen who had struck out on her own. During the years of Fascist Germany, the Fuhrer true to a socialist ideal, instilled healthy lifestyles in the population, which included encouraging young people to travel -- while his machinery butchered the untermensch. I must have asked where she was staying and her response stunned me. She was sleeping rough in an old abandoned building on a small island in the Ottawa River. We knew the site, had been there, and I was shocked. I said to her that was dangerous, to expose herself like that. She laughed and said she had a knife to protect herself.

 

We drove her back to the island where she retrieved her backpack and took her home with us. She showered, went out to the garden to dry her long blonde hair. I don't recall our children having any interest in her. She slept that night and for another few nights on a sofa in our basement recreation room that I'd covered with bedding. She shared our meals. And she said she was ready to move on. We gave her $20 which she didn't want to take, and drove her to a busy intersection where she intended to hitchhike a drive to Montreal. We wished her well, and to be safe.

 

A month or so later the telephone rang and at the other end a cheerful voice said when my husband answered: "Here is Iris!". She told him where she was, identifying the street on her return to Ottawa and Irving picked her up, brought her back for another few days' stay. And then she left again with another $20, to continue her journeys. A year later a surprise arrived in the mail, a postcard covered with a message from Iris who had returned to her home country.  

My bedside reading material now is an account of an American couple from Philadelphia who decided in the late 1930s to try to negotiate America's complex and restrictive immigration system with its strict quotas, particularly for Jews, and particularly for Jews desperately attempting to escape Germany and Austria. It's likely that the narrative in the book prompted me to dredge up that old memory of the young girl exploring Canada.

And while I was writing this, I recalled another incident, about 30 years ago when we had gone canoe-camping with our younger son, a biologist, to a nature preserve in Quebec; we had taken a day-trip from our camp and began climbing a modest enough mountain, but Irving and I were too bushed to climb to the summit and our son forged on as we waited half-way up the mountain. While we waited, a pair of climbers passed us, stopping to chat briefly; a young couple from Germany.

On another occasion years later, when we spent a week canoe-camping as we did the Bowron Lakes circuit in British Columbia with our son, halfway through the circuit we had difficulty finding a camping spot that hadn't already been taken by others. Finally, exhausted and late afternoon, we could stop paddling; we found a camping area that hadn't already been claimed. Soon after we put up our tent another canoe came by; the two sitting in the canoe looked as tired as we had been and called up to us if we would mind sharing the spot with them. We welcomed them in, offered them a cup of hot tea. They were a young couple from Austria, tourists. And they mentioned how alarmed they felt when they saw German tourists among the many people also engaged in the Bowron Lakes route. That really struck us.

In the here-and-now, another beautiful day, lots of sun, and the high winds of the last few days subdued. We went out this afternoon for our ravine hike through the same icy trails we had encountered yesterday and for which my moderately-spiked cleats strapped over my boots had proved inadequate. Today I took the precaution of pulling on serious crampons and they made all the difference, enabling me to proceed uphill and down with confidence. Sensibly, Irving had worn his heavier cleats both days.

 

I really enjoy taking photographs. I never did take any before the advent of the digital cameras; I left it always to Irving. To, in a sense, pictorially document our lives. So we have photographs that are very old, of course, long before coloured photography was even invented. They've been kept in photograph albums that are now almost 70 years old. Photographs of us before we were married, when we were still in our mid-teens. Photographs that predate that era, of when we were young children, of our parents when they were middle-aged, of relatives now long gone.

Our wedding photographs, professionally taken and memorialized in an ornate, white-satin-bound album, has been falling apart for decades. Albums that followed and are also of that vintage have also not stood the test of time. Where photographs of our children as infants and in the various stages of their childhood have been housed for many decades. They're sixty years old. In there are also photographs of our siblings, of their weddings, of family events.

I was looking through one of those old albums trying to curate certain photographs that I meant to copy and send by email to a relative. And looking at the photos of us when we were young parents, both of us found it odd, to view ourselves as we appeared so long ago. In fact, we hardly recognized ourselves. Actually, I recognized Irving well enough, but not myself. I hadn't realized back then that this was what I looked like. And nor did he, he said I had been beautiful and, he added, still am -- at age 86. That little bit of diplomacy.

I knew we had an album bought before the digital camera came to live with us, that had never been used. It has sat among the countless albums filled with photographs for many years. I doubt anyone even manufactures photograph albums any longer. So I thought that I'd set a task for myself, remove all the photographs from the albums that were falling apart and place them in the never-used album.  I'd do that, I told myself, on our return from our afternoon ravine circuit.

 

We were presented with yet another beautiful midsummer day, not hot, but mostly sunny and a brisk, cooling breeze. Jackie and Jillie know it's a Saturday, because they recognize the days of the week by the kind of after-breakfast treat they're accustomed to. Because it's a Saturday they also know we'd be getting out earlier than usual, so they were prepared. As I changed upstairs, they ripped through the bedroom in a pandemonium of exuberant expectation, leaping from loveseat to bed and racing one another into the bathroom, skidding on the rugs and exasperating me in the mess they leave behind. On the other hand, their spontaneous joy and rip-snorting activity is so hilarious, they're excused.

 

In the ravine we were surprised to see the presence of a purple coneflower plant flowering among the tall, thick bracken on the forest floor. Vying with the still-flowering thimbleberries and newly-flowering pilotweed for flamboyant admiration from us. A stray seed picked up by the wind from nearby gardens, or even someone carrying the coneflower seed in on their boots, who knows? It's delightful to see it.

Once under the forest canopy the sun's warming rays were modified by the breeze, the trail underfoot still damp from yesterday's rainfall, and we all loped alongside the creek, taking our time. Then up to the ridge above the creek, watching Jackie and Jillie minutely inspect all the vegetation and linger wherever messages were left by their friends who had been in for their own forays through the forest earlier in the day.

 

While up on the ridge, Irving heard a duck, and then once again, although we thought they had all since departed a month earlier. Then we heard one of the barred owls calling. A half-hour later as we approached the pollinating meadow we watched as three woodpeckers flew through the stand of trees before us, a mature pair of pileated, and with them a juvenile almost the size of its parents. At our distance we could make out the bright red cap of the male, and in a moment's time they all flew off.

 

At the pollinating meadow Irving found ample tiny wild raspberries to pick, and a handful of ripe-and-ready thimbleberries. Jackie and Jillie wait patiently until the picking activity is completed, then offer their expertise in taste-testing to liberate the berries from Irving's palms.

By the time we complete our circuit and amble down the street to our house, we feel hot and exercised. Time to linger briefly in the garden, to sit awhile and look about at the floral display, pleasing our aesthetic sense of garden culture.

 

I did, later, spend a frustrating hour trying to remove those old photographs in an intact state from the destroyed albums. The thick, boardlike pages of the albums are covered with a sticky material that held the photographs in place. Peeling the photographs off the sticky boards was time-consuming and the result not completely satisfactory; a few tears here and there. Then tucking the photographs into the clear plastic 'pockets' of the unused alternate album was itself an exercise in frustration.

I finally left the task half-done; retaining those parts of the old album still useful, and adding the new album to those that stood in the storage cupboard, telling myself I'd return to the job another time, and complete it -- knowing I likely won't.

 

When we were very young and lived in a community just north of Toronto in our first modest little house, Irving decided one day that he would build a little barn in the backyard. There he would house animals he was interested in. He wanted a dovecote and settled for a little barn into which he built shelving and separations, perches and cubby-holes for individual pigeons. On one side of the barn was a flight portion with perches where birds could remain outdoors but for the winter months. For pigeons is what he was interested in. On weekends we would drive to a rural country market where pigeon fanciers would gather.

There were also banty-hens, small chickens and roosters to which he also responded. We loved tohear the rooster crow in the mornings, and our neighbours never complained. And there too were to be had rabbits. We eventually acquired a Peking duck as a young duckling, and a Muscovy duck as well. The Peking duck became a responsive familiar and the Muscovy we soon discovered had a miserable temperament. Feeding and caring for the animals, cleaning up after them became a daily chore, one Irving devoted himself to in his leisure hours.

One day we bought a tiny Dutch, black-and-white rabbit and decided it would not join the others we had in the barn, but would live with us in the house. That little rabbit we named Benji. Any time I would open a shelving unit in the kitchen to extract a bread, Benji came hopping along. He loved ice cream, cheese and bread; opening the refrigerator door brought him on the hop as well. He slept under our bed, tearing up the carpeting there to suit his nesting instinct. 

In much later years, our daughter as an adult began to assemble a menagerie of animals of her own. She acquired a dog companion, then a cat, another dog, and a rabbit. She named that rabbit Benji. He hadn't the sweet temperament of our original Benji and would attack the dogs. That too is a long time ago. More recently, for the last several years, in this, our third house that we've now lived in for over 30 years, we've had a winter neighbour visit daily. He comes to visit because he knows that carrots will be put out for him. And he sits on the porch late in the day and in the evening, eating those carrots. We've named him Benji, bu dispensed with the III.

 

Unlike yesterday, today was a bit milder but not sunny. We had all-morning and afternoon snow. But in that temperature of 2C, as soon as the snow touched anything solid, it melted. Touching down on the huge winter snowpack however, it added its slight downy heft. Walking up our street with snow piled high on lawns is akin to walking through a refrigerated unit, with an icy blast radiating off the snowpack.

 

It's the same in the forest. There, the snowpack is well integrated, covering everything but the tree canopy and the creek running free at the bottom of the ravine. Because it was so mild today, when we went out with our little dogs to the forest for our usual afternoon hike, the snow was denaturizing, and the firm trails were soft and semi-slushy. Climbing uphill and descending those hills required effort in slip-backs. 

 

 

Jackie and Jillie wear their little rubber boots and will continue to, until the snowpack has melted some time next month. All the orange booties have been worn through and discarded. They're now wearing black rubber booties and they're scarcely to be noticed slipped over their tiny black paws, but they keep their paws insulated against the cold. They also keep their paws clean, requiring just a towel-wipe when we arrive back home.

A week today our younger son is scheduled to fly out from Vancouver to spend a week with us. There are no flights entering or flying out of Vancouver right now. They've been hit with a mighty snowstorm. Canada's West Coast is experiencing an odd winter season this year; colder and snowier than usual, by far. Whereas we in Eastern Canada where it's usually bone-chilling cold and snow piles up the entire season, have been experiencing a somewhat milder winter so far with less snow than usual.

Today is the shortest day of the year, and the first official day of winter. The temperature high for today is just 0C but it's damp and it feels much colder. Which means that I'll be carrying on with the comfort food selections. Yesterday's eggplant-tomato-sauce-cheese dish was just perfect. And Irving suggested for dinner tonight a meal that has quite a few similarities; Spaghetti and meatballs, with spinach on the side. Jackie and Jillie will appreciate the meatballs portions they're allotted.

We went out to the ravine a little earlier than the last several days, planning to beat early dusk setting in when the dark shade of night snaps down so quickly afterward. We were actually able to see a brief appearance of sun -- just as it was withdrawing behind the horizon -- which is to say behind the tree line seen through the forest canopy. The contrasts between the snowy landscape with its monochromatic black-and-white and the fiery ball of the sun made for an interesting canvas.

Often, when we're out in the ravine tramping the trails, Irving likes to keep up a running one-way conversation. On Saturday he happened to see two obituaries. He made no mention of them to me then, but he did today, while we were in the ravine.  They were of two men he knew rather well when he was still in the workforce. He interacted with them often in the last decade of his working life on a fairly regular basis.

They were both good at what they did as government bureaucrats, knowledgeable and a credit to the departments they worked within. He liked them both, thought very well of them, but one in particular most impressed him and they enjoyed a good relationship. He was only partially shocked at the death of this man. He felt that as a conscientious, hard-working, reliable and devoted civil servant he had been treated badly by his department after he had revealed irregularities amounting to downright fraud. They effectively neutered him, leaving him a crushed man with no option but to resign.

What he discussed with me as we walked through the forest was a kind of review of his own working life at that time with the last of the four different government departments he had been employed in through his career. Many of the issues he described I can recall, and he elaborated on others. Thinking of his two former work colleagues and their collegial relationship brought back thoughts of his own experiences, which made for a lively shared conversation. Everything takes on a different complexion when you look back over the years.

In the here and now, however, as we strode through the snowy landscape with our two little pups, we kept being accosted by other dogs, in singles and in pairs, all of whom dropped by to say hello, how're you doing, got any cookies? Irving is very conscious of the potential of these encounters and takes great care to make certain he has enough fuel with him when we set out to satisfy the needs of hungry dogs on winter afternoons in the forest.

As far as weather this November of 2022 is concerned up to the present our cup runneth over. We've had a much-appreciated spate of warm days, and ample sun, just what we don't normally expect from the penultimate month of the year. And today was no different. It dawned mild and continued that way. But since the forecast was for early afternoon rain, we decided we'd take our puppies out for their usual afternoon walk a little earlier than usual.

Before that happened, however, we tuned in to the annual Remembrance Day ceremonies. A ritual of sadness but one that ensures that the memory of those who fought and died -- against an ideology whose issues run counter to all that civilized nations value; peace, security and rule of law leading to equal justice for all -- would be  gratefully remembered. 

The ceremonial military acknowledgements married to the civilian version of remembrance held in quiet review of another year gone by in an 80-year history of the last global war that wasted too many lives. The ceremonial focus on the military role in its critical mission to free humanity from the talons of fascist Germany and its Axis partners. The deaths and disablement of countless numbers of military personnel to be grieved in a public gesture of memory renewed.

Countless other deaths of civilians, men, women, children, the elderly who died as 'collateral' damage unspeakably awful in its wide sweep of indigestible numbers. And finally, the unthinkable reality of a war within a war that led to the carefully orchestrated murders of millions of Nazi victims considered society's outcasts in Nazi ideology. To focus on the dreadful plight of Europe's Jews alone, illustrates the epitome of human depravity. We mourn them all, each and every one. And mourn more deeply that the world in turmoil made no effort to 'notice' the genocide by a stratagem that would lessen the number of its victims. A stratagem as simple as welcoming Jewish refugees from the slaughterhouse of Europe into the lands of the free world.

We who now populate the world barely recall the grimness of those war years; those alive at that time are becoming more scarce among the living. But the veterans and the civilians who were young in 1939 to 1945 live with their dim and distant memories. We ourselves recall a post-war influx of refugees. And recall the war years as well when rumours of gas chambers and giant ovens were validated in hushed, shocked tones.

Humanity is adept at surfacing through the murky depths of disasters we ourselves produce. We are resilient and live in hope for the future. The future we live in now as the present sees dreadful regional wars taking their toll now just as they did then. Now and again there are attempted genocides but none quite so successful as the Holocaust proved to be.

We, in the present era, can leave the distemper of the past behind as we pursue daily lives of peace and tranquility even while there is an awareness of the deep dysfunction within the global community of humanity.We acknowledge the haven of life in wealthy and peaceful countries where we can, while deploring bloodshed elsewhere, take our own lives to the level of deep satisfaction in the pleasure of existence.

For us, it is the simple pleasures, the fact that we can do as we please in a free and equal society. For us, the simple pleasures revolve around comfort and plenty; there is nothing we lack to enhance our lives. Danger always lurks, whether it is the threat of racism raising its voice, random violence in the streets committed by the psychopaths around us, or nature imposing a pathogenic pestilence to alert us to the preciousness of life.

 

There was a time in the not-so-distant past when most societies were agrarian for purely prqctical reasons; far more people lived outside urban areas than within them. A time when people lived in villages, and farms radiated out from the villages. At that time it was common, whether in North America, Europe or the Far East for people to live in the same house they were born in; at the very least, never to leave the village where they were born. Houses were handed down to the oldest child in the family, and others lived with them, or built modest houses of their own nearby.

When we lived for a few years in Atlanta, our youngest son took a summer research position with Emory University, working out of a research facility located in North Carolina, at the border between Georgia and North Carolina. His research took him  in close proximity to nearby small towns, and one day he came across an elderly man who could have posed for the iconic painting 'American Gothic' all on his own. They talked for a short while; the research site was adjacent to farmland that had been in the man's family for generations. He had never, ever left the area even for a visit elsewhere.

It would make for some interesting research in our current universal 'movable society' the percentage of people regionally who leave their place of birth to settle elsewhere.  How many people, for example, could count owning or living in more than three or four houses in their lifetime. We're currently living in our fourth house, although we've lived in more than four; the others not our own. We no longer live in the city where we were born because professional life mandated we move elsewhere.

The world has changed immensely since we were young. It's said that every 30 years technology itself makes great leaps forward changing not only people's lives but society itself in its interchangeability and greater fusion with the global community. Just the fact alone that in our personal lifespan we saw the appearance of motorized vehicles making horse-drawn conveyances redundant, that the wonder of telephone communication has given way to cellphones and iPhones, that letter-writing has lost its vogue to instant internet communication, that people can 'visit' other countries' residents and converse with them halfway around the world.

We've been to many other places, lived in some, and returned to our country of origin, if not the city where we were born.  At our age there is a diminished desire to travel; not because of lack of curiosity and the attractiveness of being elsewhere from time to time, but because we're comfortable and we're busily engaged right where we are in a location that offers us the best of all possible worlds.

 

Our children have long gone on to pursue their own lives and their connection to us while familial, familiar and affectionate, is peripheral to their lives. You might say that our two little dogs representing a succession of such companions, have more or less filled a gap. They've become our companions and a massive load of caring and affection emanates from us to them and vice-versa. 

Pedestrian concerns like the weather concern us daily. Will it be a good day for a walk in the forest with Jackie and Jillie? Will we be rained out, will it be too cold in sub-zero winter temperature with a raging wind and snow falling thick as fog? Well, there are few days and few weather conditions that keep us from those daily forays into nature with our little companions.

Today was a pleasant day, fully overcast, with a high temperature of 12C, and slight wind. And although the forest landscape is one of approaching winter, it continues to attract and reward us as we make our way through a maze of intersecting trails. In the process coming across other people wedded to the idea of spending time in nature's ample bosom, taking advantage of the scrubbed air, hearing birdsong, admiring the daily-changing appearance of the forest.

 

And you never know what you may come across that's interesting, amusing, instructive and worthwhile. For example, today we watched incredulously as an older German shepherd mix of a modest size confidently and energetically trod a trail we were on, carrying firmly in his jaw a partial log. No mere stick this, it would do a fireplace proud. It was thick and it was long and must have weighed considerable, yet the dog pranced happily along with it. At one point he placed it gently on the forest floor, looked around, then retrieved it and followed in the boot steps of its human companion.

 

It's strange how childhood memories long submerged deep in our subconscious can suddenly rise to the surface and startle us. Like the recollection of how when we were very young and played on the street with other children, we took notice of odd-looking automobiles appearing on the streets, at the same time that horse-drawn delivery carts still outnumbered personal vehicles and trucks. Irving remembers with me that running after these carts had their rewards, picking up hot tar and chewing it. Waiting for shards of ice to be available when the iceman used a pick to cut huge blocks to size to fit into a household's icebox.

 

These memories begin to float to the surface as we get older. Today I suddenly recalled when my family lived in a second-floor flat comprised of a tiny kitchen, a shared household bathroom, a tiny room that was my sister's and my bedroom, and a larger room that was my parents' bedroom that we also used for a kind of living room, listening together Friday night to the radio program "The Shadow Knows". The third bedroom was rented to a single older man, and the house owners lived with their two sons on the bottom floor.

I attended a school directly across the street, I believe it was called Manning Street Public School. And up the street lived a family in a large house behind which was a factory that produced seltzer water and soft drinks: Dominion Soft Drinks, owned by the family. There were four girls in the family, the youngest my age and whom I hoped would be my friend. Not just my friend, my firmly-committed best friend. My ardour was not reciprocated. It wouldn't be until years later when, at age 14, I met Irving. Finally I had a best friend.

 

My best friend and I are settling into the approach to winter. Last night we enjoyed an old staple; fish and chips, where I bake a half side of Pacific salmon, oven-'fry' potato chips and present that with asparagus tips, instead of the paella I've been making lately that finds great favour with us. Today, another traditional meal; chicken soup, chicken and potato pudding.

 

I had decided to bake a cheesecake for dessert. And to dress the top with a blueberry glaze. A two-step-preparation confection to close out our meal. We need heftier meals now, since we've been returned to mid-fall weather. The brief period of Indian summer we basked in for the past four-five days is gone. Last night the temperature dipped to -3C. Enough of a hard frost to finalize the presence of blooming annuals. The begonias that have so delighted us this past month have been frost-burned, they're drooping pathetically, the merest shadow of their former presence. Tomorrow is scheduled for finishing the garden clean-up.

 

Yesterday afternoon when I was tidying up the garden I did lift a number of the annuals, but hadn't the heart to harvest them all since they were so fresh-looking and beautiful. All it took to change that was one night of sub-zero temperature.

In the afternoon we set out as is usual for us, to take Jackie and Jillie for their romp through the ravine. All the vegetation on the forest floor has suffered a similar fate to that of the garden annuals. The deciduous trees have followed suit; barely any trees still bearing leaves. Those that still jealously cling to their foliage tend to be saplings, immature trees that often hold on to their leaves right through the winter.

 

Today's ramble through the ravine was easily the most frigid yet, this fall; crisp and intrusively cold. But the sun was out warming the landscape with its brilliant light. The temperature was 8C, but lacking the ferocity of yesterday's wind bursts. We were surprised by the numbers of people out with their companion dogs. Perhaps the result of knowing there won't be many days left of such intense sunlight to illuminate what is left of the forest leafmass. Which is not much.

Our two sons celebrate their birthdays this month. Both now in their 60s; their sister in between. We wonder, as people always do where the time has gone. All those years, all those thoughts and memories, the vast multitude of scenes fixed hard in the deep recesses of memory that surface now and again. And dreams where the children are young and then in a swift sequence, inexplicably mature.

But we live in the present, finding our comfortable niche where we can, adjusting our perspectives. Modern life does not resemble the trajectory of lives centuries ago when people rarely left their home villages, and generations of families lived together. Now, there are 'visits' with and from loved ones in lock step with the world having become a smaller place with the advent of easy travel and communications. All other interventions aside, it's called 'getting on with life'.

Cleaning day today. Nothing like routines to fix the mind on the present. From the day we married over 67 years ago, we more or less 'divided' housekeeping chores. Until shortly afterward we became homeowners, in our first modest little bungalow, and chores re-arranged themselves into the neat categories reserved for men and for women. And then, soon enough, only one of us was in the paid workforce, the other remained at home to raise three children.

Not quite accurate; both raised three children. When it came to our children each of us was fully capable of doing what the other did, and when time and opportunity permitted everything was a family affair. Now, there are four disparate households; ours the original, and three offshoot households.

As soon as the last floor has been washed in this house following the dusting, mopping and vacuuming, routine takes us with our puppies out for a long hike through forest trails. That part of our day is soul-soothing, relaxing, mind- and body-refreshing. There's an element of entertainment, of restfulness in the very physical action of making our way over the  soft surface of the forest floor, and wandering the trails, observing the changes in the tree canopy as we pass.

There was frost last night, and there will be again tonight. After which the temperature will begin to moderate temporarily and we should be enjoying temperatures in the low- to high-double digits. And with sun, which has returned to brighten our days. Last night's frost did not destroy anything, although the truth is, many of our annuals look bedraggled and bare of flowering colour, a long, unavoidable process as summer dragged on and fall took its place.

We lost nothing yesterday, the flowers that were in bloom before the frost are still blooming today. Some of them spectacularly; those plants that are relatively tolerant to cold weather. There's a reason that we have always favoured begonias in our garden planters and that reason smiles at us now in bright insouciant colours that continue to grow and glow.