They moved here, to this street, to the corner house top of the street a dozen years ago. He'd had a job in California as a software designer. They moved back home to Canada and to Ottawa where their extended family was, so he could start his own business. It was highly successful at first, and then when the dot.com bubble burst it took his business with it. After that he had a series of well-paid but too-short contracts.

When they first moved here I became acquainted with her when we both waited at the bottom of the street for the school bus. I waited with my grandchild who was attending junior kindergarten, and she with her then-six-year-old fraternal twins, a girl and a boy. Apart that they hardly resembled one another in their facial features, the girl was far taller and larger than her brother. A factor of a more robust umbilical cord in utero feeding more blood to the female fetus than the male. A fact she did not tell me, but that I learned independently much later. That size disparity is even more pronounced now that the twins are eighteen.

I recall back then how the two children would act in unison, even though they did not seem particularly bonded as twins to one another. There was, in fact, a rivalry between them. I still remember how mystified I was when I watched as they swarmed a younger child waiting by himself for the bus to arrive, aggravating and frightening him with their subtle matched and threatening movements toward him. It was so obvious what they were doing, I couldn't understand how their mother seemed so oblivious. I brought the situation to her attention and it seemed to me she feigned surprise, then called them off, expressing a concern she obviously didn't feel, and telling the twins blatantly that their behaviour was bothering me.

This was a couple that thought big; they took trips abroad for holidays even when their finances were really tight. And they would often go away on week-ends, sometimes asking us to look in on the little dog they left behind on its own, locked into the mudroom off the kitchen, to change its water bowl, see it had enough to eat, and take it into the ravine for long walks with our own two little dogs. Or, the little fellow was left with another neighbour, living temporarily in her house with her three cats. She never allowed that little dog to enter the house beyond the kitchen; if it tentatively tried to join them in the family room it was ordered back into the kitchen. Hard not to deplore such stern and exclusionary control.

Before her husband was unemployed she took up a job working part time at a local walk-in clinic, using her nursing background to get along, but she never liked the job. Trouble was, nursing positions were in short supply. So she decided to go back to college and earn a teaching diploma. And then, realized there was a downturn in employment opportunities for teachers in the province. A real dilemma, since she had put so much into furthering her education, only to discover it was for naught in the employment-prospects sense.

She applied for employment with the federal public service, while her husband took intermittent contracts. Eventually she was offered a position in Toronto, so for a year-and-a-half she rented a small apartment in Toronto and commuted on week-ends back home to be with her family. She did not lack in ambition nor work ethic, and it was obviously a difficult time for her and her family.

But then, finally she was successful in obtaining a transfer back to Ottawa. Because neither she nor her husband can rely on any kind of pension plan outside what they will be able themselves to arrange, they placed a down payment on a condominium unit, and rent it out, as landlords, the income they derive helping them to save money in a RRSP for retirement purposes.

They plan, when the time is right, to sell the condo before they retire, but to move into it beforehand to claim it as their principal residence, to avoid paying capital gains taxes. She feels confident their little scheme will work nicely for them.

He enjoys his food enormously, likes variety and has a particular fondness for certain food preparations. Including, of course, various desserts that really please his palate. And he thought it would be lovely for me to bake a cream pie. Chocolate cream pie, coconut cream pie, butterscotch cream pie, he loves them all. I prefer a lemon meringue pie, and he likes those too, but not nearly as much as the others.

It has been years, actually, since I've baked a cream pie for him. When our children were young I would often bake those pies to finish a family meal. Our children have long since strode out into the world on their own. And he was feeling a little nostalgic for the sumptuous taste in his mouth of those long-ago-produced delectables.

So I agreed, and he chose above the others, to have a coconut cream pie. And that is what I set about doing. It is a three-stage operation which goes some way to explaining why it doesn't represent a favourite for me to produce, from my perspective. First, comes the crust, which must be pre-baked. I used the pie dish that our younger son had made for me, a pottery dish that never fails to produce a well-baked crust. I also used the wooden rolling pin that he had made for me decades earlier and which I prefer over all other of my implements.

Once the crust was baked and set aside to cool, the filling was prepared, cooked on the stove (milk, flour, sugar, egg yolks, butter, vanilla, shredded coconut) and then allowed to cool as well, before being ladled out into the baked pie crust. And then the egg whites were whipped to a thick, stiff froth, with a little granulated sugar and cream of tartar, then piled over the filling, from crust-edge to crust-edge. And additional coconut sprinkled over.

Then finally baked until the meringue was well browned. Voila!

There are no cardinals singing sweetly in our backyard early mornings, these last few days. The weather has taken a turn, this early March, toward the very cold end of the winter-weather spectrum. The birds huddle for shelter from the harsh winds and icy cold wherever they can. Squirrels still busy themselves running across the back fence, from there to our side door where they will find peanuts waiting for them on the steps. Their fresh pawprints in the snow reveal their active presence, but we also see them streaking across the fence, from our view out the breakfast room sliding glass doors.

The garden lies hushed under its burden of snow and ice. We can always tell how cold it is by glancing at the rhododendrons; their leaves react instantly to the cold, shrivelling and closing up like tight spears. And the magnolia buds look tight and miserable, in the cold. The hemlock and the holly look just fine. It has been years since they were carefully wrapped in snow blankets to ensure they survived our winters.

They haven't been wrapped protectively in at least four years now and they somehow manage to get through the winter to flourish into life beautifully once spring has arrived. At this time of year thoughts begin to turn to spring. Even though the temperature dropped to minus-20-degrees Celsius last night, greeting us at minus-16-degrees this morning, with the forecast warning that it will be colder even the coming night....

And I wonder how many of the bulbs that I planted in the late fall will nudge their way to springing out of the thawing earth, to give us a colourful display of flowers in the months to come...

Yesterday, when the American mid-west was horrified and most certainly traumatized by the arrival of yet another vicious group of tornadoes resulting from massive warm-weather systems coming up against equally large cold weather systems resulting in ferocious tunnel winds, we were in our neighbourhood ravine, slogging through the wet snow, while overhead strong gusts of wind sounded like locomotives approaching time and again.

Ontario had received an Environment Canada warning of strong winds prevailing throughout the day Saturday. Large old evergreens were being blown back and forth, dropping boughs in their distress. Bare-branched deciduous trees were in an agony of movement, blasted by the winds that roared above. It might not have seemed a very auspicious time to be in the ravine ambling along with our two little dogs, since obviously enough such rampant gusts are capable of downing large and heavy limbs, as well as dead trees, but we came to no harm. The snow underfoot was well littered with the detritus that had fallen from above.

There had been episodes some few years earlier when we experienced min-tornado-bursts coming through the ravine, and on that occasion a number of very old pines had been snapped like matchsticks. Oddly enough these huge old pines were picked off, even as they stood within a group of other large old pines which remained intact.

Had the weather been any colder than it was - mild for that day at plus-2-degrees Celsius - it would have been quite uncomfortable, with the wind lashing at our faces. As it was, there were only occasional times when we felt well slapped about, our cheeks stinging. My eyes, however, were continually watering under the assault.

We were glad to complete our routine circuit; this time it took more like two hours rather than the usual hour-and-a-half, even though it was easier going underfoot than it had been the day before when we really struggled through the newfallen snow, particularly uphill.

And then, later at home, we looked at the newspapers, seeing photographs of people bereft of their homes, mourning their dead, and we understand quite distinctly how fortunate we are.

It was a fascinating book to read, revealing scientific insights into how the human brain works. Its chapters dealt with various aspects of the manner in which the brain works, its malleability, and capability of altering how we react, how we feel, how we function.

Pain is "created by the brain and projected onto the body", according to one noted scientific-medical investigator and he set out to prove just that. And according to the book, relating the experiments and their outcomes, repetitive action can 'teach' the brain to act otherwise, to activate new neurons that will not transmit pain to the body.

"Wall and Melzack showed that the neurons in our pain system are far more plastic than we ever imagined, that important pain maps in the spinal cord can change following injury, and that a chronic injury can make the cells in the pain system fire more easily - a plastic alteration - making a person hypersensitive to pain. Maps can also enlarge their receptive field, coming to represent more of the body's surface, increasing pain sensitivity. As the maps change, pain signals in one map can "spill" into adjacent pain maps, and we have developed "referred pain", when we are hurt in one body part but feel the pain in another..."

Which goes a long, long way to explaining the mystery of "phantom pain", that peculiar sensation that people experience who have lost limbs, but feel that absent limb is still there, because their brain thinks it is, and transmits feeling from brain map neurons representing the absent limb so people experience the eerie sensation that it is still present, when it is not.

The book explores how culture with its deeply engrained habits can alter and transform the brain profoundly. As an example it looked briefly at Sea Gypsies, a nomadic people living on tropical islands in the Burmese archipelago and off the west coast of Thailand.

"A wandering water tribe, they learn to swim before they learn to walk, and live over half their lives in boats on the open sea, where they are often born and die. They survive by harvesting clams and sea cucumbers. Their children dive down, often thirty feet beneath the water's surface, and pluck up their food, including small morsels of marine life, and have done so for centuries. By learning to lower their heart rate, they can stay under water twice as long as most swimmers. they do this without any diving equipment. One tribe, the Sulu, dive over seventy-five feet for pearls."

The Brain That changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science, by Norman Doidge, M.D., is most certainly a provocative, worthwhile read.

Just think, to simplify our lives, all we have to do is successfully lecture our brains (minds) repeatedly to perform in ways that we feel it most convenient and likely to produce a well-rounded personality, a successful lifestyle, a healthy body and we're in the pink!

A 'happy face' should round out that suggestion.

March came in yesterday like the proverbial lion. Blustery and cold, with snow whipped all over the landscape, and bits of icy rain thrown in for good measure. That kind of weather translates as full winter-gear for our two little dogs when we prepare them for an outing in our wooded ravine.

Good thing they've long since become accustomed to wearing protective coats and boots, else it would be most difficult to have them out in this weather, since their little paws freeze and we've no option then but to carry them along. Difficult enough to struggle through deep snow uphill without having to carry two little dogs. They manage well enough if they're adequately protected.

Given the weather, though, we just have to wonder at the imagined plight of those less accustomed to it, who have arrived earlier than they perhaps should have in their southern-spring migration. Yesterday we saw a pair of Mallards steaming along in the middle of the creek, wondering at their ability to withstand the cold, since the edges of the creek were well iced over; just the current maintaining an open channel for them in the centre.

And we had also seen again, a small flock of robins, those live-eaters who flee this geography normally when fall arrives, to return when milder weather can be guaranteed by instinctive memory. What on Earth are they doing here now, and how do they manage to find enough to eat in this frozen environment?

When we bought this house, it was the only house on the street for sale. It had been built three years after the already-existing houses in a lot set aside for a different architectural plan. All of the other houses had been sold and were being lived in, on this quiet street backing onto a wooded ravine.

When we first viewed its interior it was in an unfinished state. What attracted my husband to the house was its huge wall expanses where our collection of paintings and Japanese kimono could be showcased. Since that time paintings have edged out most of the kimono.

It is the houses across from us that back immediately on the forest. As a backdrop to our house, there are other houses. The sight of which offends my husband's aesthetic. He would much preferred to have backed on the ravine, so we could view trees out our back windows.

Our appreciation of the interior of the house, its exterior design and its placement on our lot all were of immense attraction to us. The fact that we had immediate access to a wooded ravine directly across the street from our house was another, invaluable dimension of excitement. For the ravine, to us, expresses immeasurable quality of life. Not only because it bequeaths us with cleansed air quality, but because it also affords us the opportunity any time of the day or night, to explore its pathways and enjoy the closeness to nature.

In the years since we moved into this house that has been our home for over twenty years, my husband has steadily made all manner of personal improvements that suit our decorating tastes, inside and out. Among which has been the installation of stained glass windows and doors. We did not actually envision that the entire house would eventually be converted to stained glass windows covering the existing windows, but this is precisely what has occurred.

And yesterday, my husband installed another panel of stained glass in our living room, at the curved top of the Palladian window set, up at the second-story height. I don't mind admitting that I would gladly have foregone the pleasure of seeing that exquisitely coloured-and-designed window not being installed. But it was, and soon to join it will be two rectangular windows, completing the stained glass coverage of that window wall.

When we bought the house my husband also purchased an industrial-grade set of two scaffolds, thinking ahead to when he would be performing all manner of work and upgrades in the house, and outside the house. It is time-consuming and heavy work setting those scaffolds up for use. When a similar window at a similar height was installed years earlier in the foyer, I clambered up on the scaffolds, one installed over the other, to assist in the installation of that window.

Because of exterior retrofitting work my husband had been engaged in during the summer months he had used the scaffolding outside, on the deck, to allow him to work in relative safety at the exterior second-floor level. He had decided to store the scaffolding parts in the larger of our two garden sheds which he had constructed several years earlier. We're currently in the throes of winter, with plenty of snow and ice built up, and it would have represented an even more involved and difficult bit of work to haul them indoors to set them up in the living room.

Instead, my husband brought into the house from the garage his tallest ladder and set it up in the living room, blithely setting aside my protestations that he wait until spring when all three windows would be ready for installation and he could use the scaffolding. He devised a way to bind the window with a 'handle' on its top, so he could slowly haul it, one-handed, up that ladder, to plunk it into the window frame and secure it. At the bottom of the ladder my heart was pounding.

His self-confidence and flawless measurements succeeded, as they always seem to. He managed neatly to slip the bindings out from under the window, then gently tapped small nails into place as a temporary measure to ensure the security of the windows before finally securing them with the moulding he had prepared.