The brutal overnight frigid air and blasting winds moderated sufficiently by morning that when we came down for breakfast today it was -27C to start the day. But the wind had abated significantly. Yesterday, throughout the day the wind gusts were so bitter even though the thermometer rose to -20C, with the windchill factored in it felt like -40C, and Environment Canada issued one of their extreme weather warnings.

Needless to say, as weather fit for neither man nor beast continued, we decided we had little option but to keep our two little beasties and ourselves safely tucked into the house for yet another day. With hopes that tomorrow would gift us with more tolerable weather. It's at times like this during the winter when those photographs I'm so fond of taking of our garden come in handy.

If for no other reason than to remind us that there are other seasons and other reasons to appreciate what nature throws at us. Contemplating the tone, texture, architecture and colour of the garden in the winter as it appears in countless of those photos is a fragile, yet occasionally needful assist to one's mood.

During the summer months we give hardly a thought to oncoming seasons when the garden is temporarily put to rest. We're too busy ministering to the garden, a tuck here another there. The pleasure ours, entirely. When the colours and textures catch our aesthetic eye in passing, there's a brief twinge of satisfaction that we've helped nature create a garden expressing our idea of everlasting beauty.

Not so everlasting, after all, other than for the fact that it returns, season after season, expressing itself in slightly different landscapes than those that came before, as perennials, shrubs, trees and other garden denizens mature, take up more room, shove out those that are less aggressive, creating another micro-landscape altogether.

Usually just as pleasing, occasionally more so, but in the creation of these follow-up landscapes we take note of the processes and either accept them or begin to alter them to more closely reflect what it is that we intended to achieve. All of this makes for a great deal of pleasure, of satisfaction in achievement, of gratitude to nature.

A gratitude which extends, of course, to the frozen landscapes we now contemplate, burying, hiding and preserving our gardens.

Like his one-time friend and fellow traveller and writer V.S. Naipaul, Paul Theroux is a master storyteller. A travel writer, novelist and keen observer of the human condition and human nature he has fascinating insights into national characters, history, heritage and human folly. To read him is to educate yourself. He very often presents as cantankerous and critical, but he can also be very humanly sentimental. His disgust for the most basic of wretched human characteristics can be overridden by witnessing acts of human decency.

Above all, he's a fascinating chronicler, his casual conclusions interwound with a deep heterogeneous filing cabinet stuffed away in his memory like a kaleidoscope of human traits, historical events, tidbits of political, scientific, artistic anomalies that he interposes making for addictive reading. His observations of minute details barely noticeable by most people reveal a deep conviction within this man that nothing should be overlooked, that everything has meaning, and no experience is complete without draining it completely of its significance or lack thereof to form an impression.

"There was once a mosque where this cathedral stands. The mosque had itself displaced a Christian church. That early church had been built on the ruins of a Roman temple to Diana. These layers of history, like sedimentary rock, are less typical of Spanish history than of the historical multiplicity of the Mediterranean coast. Very similar layers existed on the coasts of Italy and Albania and Egypt, and elsewhere. Nine cultures on t he same spot.
"The city center of Valencia was mobbed with beggars jostling for the best begging spots. Beggars tended to congregate around the churches (as they do around mosques in Muslim countries). They were not all old women selling prayer cards, or the lame or the blind. There were some pale youths and harridans, bearded junkies in black leather, all haranguing passersby or church goers. Some others held elaborate signs, I am the father of three young children and I have no job."

Theroux was on a one-year, unscheduled, spontaneity-driven, curiosity trip across the Mediterranean, recounted in his 1995 book The Pillars of Hercules, A Grand Tour of the Mediterranean. He meant to visit as many towns, villages and cities as he could on this odyssey of discovery to places he had never before seen, only heard about, read avidly about, and wanted to experience for himself. He was travelling while the civilization breakdown in Serbia, Bosnia and Montenegro, Croatia, Kosovo was taking place. There, nothing but degraded misery had captured the landscape and the people within.

What he found was a common link between that condition there and in other countries of the Mediterranean was a fascination with pornography. Porno magazines and broadsheets available anywhere and everywhere, in the most innocuous of places, right next to children's books, toys, candy.

"In the primmest little districts in Alicante or Murcia or Mallorca, such films were on view next to the candy store or the hairdresser. And the candy stores themselves sometimes sold porno -- not just tit and bum magazines, but hard-core porn. Here is Granny behind the counter selling Juan a lottery ticket and on the magazine rack with the kiddies books and the evening papers and How to Knit, is S & M Monthly, with page after page of women being tortured, burned, tied up, sexually mutilated, spiky objects being forced into their vaginas, their arms being twisted, their screams recorded: Help! Socorro!
"Porno comic books seemed to me the worst of all, because the sexual torture was idealized and easily accessible, in a realm of unreality and fantasy that seemed dangerous. I presumed that photographs would be off-putting and disgusting -- and such photographs hardly existed, showing torture and death. But anything was possible in the comics, anything could be pictured, and usually was, including bestiality and necrophilia. 'If you are not going to buy that magazine, please put it down, senor'."

Theroux was fixated on getting to Albania, though Italians warned him he would not see anything worthwhile there. He, however, was intent on seeing for himself what it was like there. He did arrive in Split, though his passage was difficult to arrange, for he travelled only by bus or train or in small boats deliberately, eschewing air travel in favour of travelling the way ordinary people would, hoping to be able to engage in casual, enlightening conversation with as many people as he could, using his rudimentary, but useful French, Italian, German and, of course, English, since he is American. He characterized his own country as one whose culture filtered throughout the world, a culture of violence and infantalization, as exemplified by Hollywood action films and Disney.

"The point about atrocity stories, especially here, was that everyone told them. For a week I had been listening to stories about chetnik fanaticism; but, killing time in Split until the day the Ancona ferry left, I met an aid worker from Canada who told me about the Croatian fanaticism. 'There were groups of Ustasha soldiers in the bars here in Split, all singing Nazi songs -- the 'Horst Wessel' and all of that'.'
"The Ustasha were Croatian commandos, much like the Serbian chetniks. They modeled themselves on the Nazi SS and wore black shirts and a 'U' insignia. Their ruthlessness and racism dated to the fascist Ustasha regime which had governed Croatia with Nazi help during the Second World War and off its own bat, without Nazi control, had operated its own death camp. Serbian 'ethnic cleansing' was now well enough known to be universally condemned, but this policy of Croatian 'purification' was new to me."

I can recall myself as a child, during the Second World War living with my immigrant parents in Toronto, hearing them speak in hushed tones about 'chetniks' and their threat to Europe's Jews during the Nazi-mandated extermination of Jewry, a fate my mother and father, refugees from the Pale of Settlement and a small Polish shtaitel respectively, escaping Russian and Polish pogroms, who had made their way to Canada a decade earlier.

Those are formidable emotions, how we think of, feel about, react to, long for, remember those whom we love. They are attachments that run deep into the very core of our being. They are feelings that no amount of space and time can interfere with. Those for whom our love runs so deep, despite a physical absence, are with us every moment of our day. They linger deep within our thoughts.

And when a visit, however brief is imminent, the emotional shock of anticipating being with them physically can be overwhelming in its reality that we will be given the opportunity, so often repeated and never often enough, to hug them, kiss them, speak directly face to face setting aside arbitrary distance for a treasured period of time that the trip consists of.

The natural rhythm of being together, of casual connection linking to the inexhaustible bank of memory initiates another round of experiences together that will linger deep in the subconscious as new memories are formed and they too will aggregate along with the earlier ones dating back to the very consciousness of being.

When the visit is over it threatens emotional equilibrium. Your thoughts, day after day, have informed you that one day of the visit is over, the next starts, until you reach the point where your discussion with yourself informs you that two days are left, one day, and finally the day of departure. Each of you has your own life to lead, and as fate and fortune have it, you lead them separately.

The act of greeting is one of full-blossomed joy, the act of parting is a labour of grudging necessity. the acting out of which is performed in full reversal. You hug, you proclaim softly how much it meant to you to be together. You wish the other a good trip, assuring that you will, as always, keep in touch through other mediums, at a distance.

And finally, you watch as the one your life is inextricably linked with walks away, backpack riding high, turns into the airport and disappears.

Just like yesterday, an overcast sky with moderate temperatures rising to -6C. Little wind to speak of, unlike yesterday, but much damper feeling, somehow, even though yesterday for much of the day soft, billowy snow tumbled down out of the sky. This morning, we sat at breakfast, watching the snow do that yet again. Lazily floating down, straight down. A little red squirrel took possession of a slice of leftover toast on the rail of the deck and magically whisked it away to be relished at some other time and place.

So much snow had accumulated that once again, as was done a week previous, my husband had to get out a ladder to ascend it leaning against the metal canopy atop the deck to clear it of snow. There's about three feet of snow on the roofs of our garden sheds, but the canopy isn't supposed to have more than six inches of snow-weight (usually mixed with ice) for safety reasons. We wouldn't like to have it collapse, hence the need to sweep the accumulated snow off it. Obviously, it wasn't a good idea to install it on the deck since the deck itself is so high, given our partial-ravine lot.

Before my husband installed it several years ago, we'd used a succession of canvass-topped canopies and in time weather destroyed all of them. Each would be tucked away during the winter in storage, taken out in spring, reinstalled and used for spring, summer and fall. And each lasted about five years before succumbing to wear.

Because the temperature showed a few degrees higher than yesterday's -8C, we decided not to put those useless boots on the puppies, reasoning that it was just on the cusp of what they can stand. So off we went, and they were happy bouncing along the trails. We felt despite what the thermometer read it felt colder than yesterday, regardless of yesterday's wind and today's lack of same. By the time we got the little fellows back in the house their pads were well encrusted with stiff ice. Laving them with warm water did the trick.

Otherwise, they had a good ravine walk. Since we're plunging again tonight to -21C, and Friday's daytime high and those of succeeding days will likely go no higher than -17C, it's questionable when we'll be able to get out again in the woods with Jackie and Jillie, sigh.

Today, we know, represents only a temporary reprieve from the bone-cracking frigid temperatures we've been experiencing for well over a week, but it's a great relief nonetheless. People who have been unable to get out and enjoy winter when the thermometer gets stuck at -17C at its warmest point in the day were finally, like us, able to get out with their dogs, or simply on their own, to traipse about in the woods and admire the soft ambiance of newfallen snow.

Yesterday on our way to do the grocery shopping we stopped briefly at one of the many pet supply shops to see whether there might be another kind of winter boot for dogs superior to those we have and which have failed so miserably, but they were cleaned right out. The shop manager told us there was a rush on all dog boots and they hadn't anything left. But she did speak of Muttluks approvingly, considering them the absolute best of the lot produced, and then we informed her of our experience with them, finding them wanting.

But it was those Muttluks that we placed over our two little hairy rascals' feet today, setting out, finally, for a walk in the woods. Because snow had fallen throughout the morning, albeit in a desultory manner, fresh snow was on the ground, and that, together with a daytime high of -8C, meant they would be just on the cusp of freezing their little feet. When we finally did get out it took five minutes before Jillie lost one, two three of her booties, and Jackie one of his.

Instead of replacing them, in view of the comparatively balmy atmosphere we simply pocketed the boots and forged on. It was, as it happened, mild enough in comparison to what we'd been experiencing at highs of -17C, that they seemed not to notice the cold and happily made their way along the trails, so we felt we would be fine throughout the walk with them today, and we were. Why it is that Jillie, heavier than Jackie and less inclined than he is to dash through snow off the trails is the one who loses her boots is beyond us.

Jackie leaps about acrobatically, joyfully rushes off trail, up the trail, down the trail, in his frantic busyness covering twice the area we do, plodding along behind them, and the three boots that remained, stayed firmly in place. We had an uneventful, happy walk, both of them beyond delighted to be back out in the forest for their daily traipse-about, so we took an especially long route, one we were ourselves able to enjoy because the cold was less intense, the trees shielded us from the prevailing winds, and it was such fun watching our two puppies happily scampering about.

Little wonder that Canadians are so preoccupied with the weather that comments and concerns about the prevailing weather conditions tend to feature large in dominating any conversations, and are avidly read in media reports of impending weather fronts.

Canada is a geography of extremes in weather conditions, changing seemingly from one to the other with less than a moment's delay between them. Weather confronts us in this northern geography. It is too dry, too wet, too cold, too hot, too windy, too damp and all the nuances of each singly and in combination to intrigue and bedevil us whether we are located in northern, central, western or eastern Canada.

From our prairies to our ocean coasts, our Arctic to our Great Lakes, our mountains and our forests, Canadians live with the vagaries of Mother Nature's weather systems sent to enhance and to complicate our lives. We learn, lest we perish in the attempt, to drive in extreme weather conditions that winter brings us with its sleet, freezing rain, snowstorms, winter winds and iced-over terrain.

We enjoy an abundance of natural privileges in this Great White North of ours, but we also learn, lest we ignore it to our peril, to respect nature, to pay attention to her innumerable whimsical seasonal episodes contrasting and competing, compelling our attention.

This winter is turning out to be exceptionally challenging. The cold mass that has migrated from the
Arctic and whose polar chill has beset the country, coast to coast, with problems associated with coping with the unusual prolonged cold spell comprises both a threat and an opportunity to practise those Canadian skills of endurance.

High winter winds bringing down trees and power lines leave thousands without electrical power. Water pipes, though buried ostensibly deep enough to withstand the ordinary Canadian winter's frost levels, this year are proving a disconcerting problem with these low freezing temperatures of -20C to -30C. Road conditions during weather systems not given to safety, another concern. The homeless in their need, while spurning in many instances municipal and church shelters open for winter nighttime safety, muster all their resources to survive, and some will not.

Those among us who have the good fortune -- and that is most Canadians -- to live in warm, dry homes, concentrate on keeping warm and dry, allowing thoughts and inclinations to go the way of alternates to outdoor living for the time being ... spending their time at their work places, and in the evenings playing board games, busy time on the Internet, eating comfort food and placating their sense of enforced isolation with the comforts of modern-day existence.

Thinking of what could occur; a loss of electricity for one thing, forcing us to go into the overdrive of coping, is shoved aside for the gratitude enveloping us as we wait out this implacably miserable Arctic cold that appears to relish its temporary abode among us.

Just when you have finally convinced yourself that this unusual Polar weather system that has obviously gone astray that we've been experiencing the last week cannot possibly last, indications arise that it can and it will. The breathtakingly icy air appears to enjoy its visit and is loathe to depart.

We've been experimenting with alterations to the boots we put on our little dogs to protect their tender paws from this extreme cold. The boots that manage to stay in place when the temperature dips only to -12C, simply will not stay protectively on their tiny paws (even though they're a size XS) in temperatures like -17C, as occurred frustratinglywhen we were out yesterday in the forest determined to do a shorter circuit.

We're fed up with those ill-designed boots, expensive and with ample advertising credits, yet useless in these circumstances.

So we're resigned to having the puppies remain in the house other than for those times when they've got to go out to the back yard. They're anxious to get out there and when they do, instantly embark on spurts of vigorous play, spurred on by the snow and the cold. It takes but a moment for them to realize just how cold it is when their little pads begin to freeze to the icy exterior and they finally, albeit reluctantly, run back up the stairs to enter the house.

Last night the temperature plunged to -30C, and when we came down for breakfast this morning it sat at -28.7C, with a light wind. Wind that would seem a tiny breeze at any other time, becomes a sharp knife in these plunged temperatures. The high today is -22C, with a windchill of -38C. We miss our daily jaunts in the forest, but we've got to be patient. Because, of course, the Arctic cold cannot last -- much -- longer -- can -- it?

So I've decided we need another big pot of aromatic and restorative chicken soup with our dinner tonight. Its fragrance is now permeating all the rooms of the house, and before too long will be joined by the enticing smells of roasting chicken breast with mushrooms and onions, a casserole of potatoes and onions, and asparagus.

Just before serving the chicken soup a well-beaten egg will be drizzled over the boiling soup for instant egg noodles, topped with chopped green onion. Serving as an antidote to the extreme conditions outside our home.