To own a female is to own a prized possession. For it is a woman's body that brings forth the new generation. And it is a woman who nurtures that new generation. And it is women who have, through the millennia, suffered the gross indignity, psychical harm, physical battering that comes with representing property rights.

We live in a modern era, the 21st Century. We live in a presumably egalitarian world where women, under the law, have equal rights with their male counterparts. That is, of course, contingent on where you live in the world. And, of course, it is also contingent on the males living alongside you if you're a woman treasuring those values.

It is one thing to guarantee a social condition by law, another to guarantee that all those who live under those laws will surrender to its justice. Human beings are flawed in many ways, among those is the inherent belief that seems to be sequestered deep within the inner psyche as a genetic inheritance that one gender is supreme over the other.

Tribal, clan and religious influences to the present day shape their societies to accept and believe that women are inferior to men and as such must naturally submit to men. Accorded all the rights of another kind of livestock, their potential as bearers of the new generation is bargained for by their menfolk, the ownership of which is seen as a fundamental guarantee of survival of his genes.

Which leads, in many societies, to brutal control measures like infibulation, a more bodily-invasive attempt of control than the chastity belts of an earlier era and invention. Tribal, clan and family honour are paramount, and a religion based on a dark age of nomadic tribal protection of possessions against the malign intentions of an opposing tribe uses power over females to dishonour to consolidate their customary control over women.

In Kingston, Ontario, a trial holding the Shafia family of father, wife, eldest son to account for the planned honour killing of the family's three teen-age daughters and the father's first wife, is just winding down. Witnesses for the Crown have testified to the horrors of daily life for three girls whose ambition it was to escape the stifling, brutal confines of their family life.

The kind of honour accepted through the demands of Sharia law or fundamentalist Hinduism and the debasement and subjugation of females in a country like Afghanistan or India has been imported to Canada. Canada has seen a series of such honour killings, from teen-age girls in rebellion against the paterfamilias-clan-imposed 'laws' of submission, to those of wives killed by husbands.

It is beyond belief sometimes how implacably cruel, and miserably ignorant human beings can be in their sub-human relations to one another.

He has boundless patience with her, far more than I do. Far from that moment when I first brought her home as a puppy, 19 years ago. Then, the sight of the scrawny little miniature poodle had offended him. He had sniffed, he wouldn't have minded a 'real' dog in the house, not a rat posing as a dog.

Before long the little rat was placed on his chest at night when it was tired from a day's play, to sleep in peace, while he watched television. Now, 19 years later, blind, deaf, and her fastidious awareness of everything around her pretty well gone, she is heavily dependent. Even her sense of smell has been impacted. Many of her teeth are gone. She is confused at the best of times, upset at the lapse of her senses at the worst of times, and fretful. For the most part, however, she is resigned to her condition and copes with it fairly well. Even though she has to be physically brought directly before her food bowl, and she has likewise to be physically guided and encouraged to drink water.

We have to make certain assumptions related to experience respecting her need to urinate and defecate, hoping to manage to guide her to the outdoors - actually carry her down the steps of the deck which she can longer see on her own and which she had taken, blindly, to attempting to leap, instead of making her way gingerly down them, lest she come to harm - depositing her in the backyard, hoping she will perform.

She doesn't always; her bodily routines have been just as upset as any other of what were once her routines. Her beloved tennis balls which once meant the world to her have languished unrecognized for years. She has fallen unwittingly down the stairs so often we have had to place protective gates around them, just as one would with an infant.

When she is not sleeping she will pace restlessly throughout the house, without stop. In the process, bumping into immovable objects; chairs, tables, walls, whatever happens to be in the way of her progress. Occasionally, those 'bumps' are loud and wince-inducing - by us, not her - she simply shakes her hoary little head and continues her peregrinations. She will stop only when she is lifted onto the sofa where she has long been accustomed to sleep; only she is no longer capable of leaping there on her own.

At night, she sleeps as she always has, on the little loveseat in our bedroom, across from our bed. Because she kept falling off, no longer aware of physical parameters, my husband built a portable gate to enclose her there, once she was prepared for her long, night-time rest, along with ourselves in bed for the night. Last night, as has happened before, she did nothing, no evacuation, no urination before bed-time. Despite that it was raining heavily, and she was wearing a raincoat to protect her aged body from a complete drenching, she simply wandered aimlessly in circles without relieving herself.

That relief came while we were asleep, while she was up on the loveseat for the duration of the night. As has happened before. My husband awoke, took stock of the situation, changed her linen (we maintain a bedtime 'blanket' stretched taut over the loveseat for her), washed her feet which had become soiled, settled her back down, then took the soiled linen downstairs to the laundry room to wash it by hand in hot, soapy water.

And then, at half-past four in the morning, those tasks completed, he decided to set about using his newly-acquired bread maker to bake himself a sourdough loaf for breakfast. Which was the fragrance that pervaded our bedroom hours later, as the bread was fully baked.

In his book, King Solomon's Ring, Nobel-prize-winner Konrad Lorenz, a renowned animal ethologist and ornithologist, wrote, among other things of his admiration for the intelligence of crows. More recent studies of the intelligence of crows have also testified to their admirable memories of events or threats which can be handed down through generations. These highly adaptable, clever birds are not admired by everyone. I do, though, like them, and always have.

In the Tantramar Marsh of New Brunswick, we saw crows and their big cousins, ravens, in abundance. They are impressive birds. When we lived in Tokyo, there were large crows called Jungle Crows around our compound; around all of Tokyo, actually. These birds were so large and heavy that when they walked on the metal roof of our house it sounded as though a man was up there, traipsing about. They used to prey on the feral cats that roamed the city, living off garbage, and hiding out in the sewer system.

Here, where we live now, in Ottawa, we often see crows in huge, loud cawing gatherings, well-named as a "murder" of crows. And when we hear a commotion of crows, we become aware that an owl is present, with the crows harassing the owl, itself calm and studiously ignoring the hysteria of the crows. On occasion we see and hear passing ravens in our forested ravine. And we have become accustomed to regular crow clients following us to take advantage of the peanuts we leave in caches for the squirrels.

We've noticed of late that some of our neighbours' lawns have become popular with area crows. So popular that the lawns have been completely destroyed. The crows are doing what comes naturally to them; they're carnivores, and will eat just about anything, including the carcasses of dead animals they may come across. What attracts them to the lawns is the presence of hideous grubs, fat and disgusting, the larval stage of June beetles. In their search for the beetles they dig up lawns and leave devastation.

This year must have resulted in a bumper crop of June beetles laying more eggs that morph into grubs than usual. And the crows have taken note, to the immense disgust and distress of proud homeowners. Who, in turn, find nothing attractive whatever about crows.

June Bug

click to enlargePhoto by: George K. Bryce/Animals Animals or Earth Scenes

June Bug, common name for any of several beetles in the scarab family, also called June beetle. The adults are most common in June. In the northern United States, the name is applied to the numerous species that are known as May bugs in the southern United States, where they emerge earlier. The brown, stout-bodied adults are about 25 mm (about 1 in) long and feed on leaves. The larvae, known to horticulturists as white grubs, burrow in soil, feed on the roots of plants, and often damage grass lawns. The larval stage persists for two to three years.

In the southern United States, the name green June beetle is applied to a similar green-and-brown beetle that, in the adult stages, feeds on ripe figs and other fruit. The larvae, like those of the northern June beetle, live in the ground and eat plant roots but do little damage to important plants. The name June beetle is applied in Europe to beetles closely related and similar in habits to the June beetles of the northern United States.

Scientific classification: June bugs belong to the family Scarabaeidae of the order Coleoptera. May bugs are classified in the genus Phyllophaga. The green June beetle is classified as Cotinis nitida. European June beetles are classified in the genus Rhizotrogus.

She must have appeared downright angelic when she was young, with her sweet face, its dainty, regular features surrounded by blond, curly hair. She still has that cherubic aspect about her, at age 50. Her hair is still almost shoulder-length, framing her face with its instant friendly smile. Belying that smile lately, however, are the deeply-etched furrows on her brow, just under her fringe of blonde hair.

She greets us warmly, and we are always glad to see her. As we do in odd places; walking her large rescue dog in the ravine - but not of late, her leisure hours have been truncated by need - and in the seasonal department of large box stores where she works for short periods of time as a clerk.

More latterly, at the produce department of the newly-opened supermarket we have been shopping at. There, she stops briefly to chat animatedly with us. Earlier, she had informed me that she had started off on a kind of employment new to her, which doesn't pay much, but is deeply satisfying for her. It's working with seniors in their own homes, to help them get along on a daily basis, to keep them independent and out of hospitals and nursing-care homes.

The last time we met, a few days ago, she mused, without bitterness or irony, how, in retrospect, her life hadn't prepared her for where she now is. Reinventing herself, as it were, trying at her age, to find financial security when she knows that people who had taken civil service jobs had a secure retirement fund behind them and were already musing about retirement. While she had to concentrate on the dire focus of keeping herself together financially.

She had been working fifty-hour weeks: 30 hours on her growing elder-care business, and 20 with the supermarket, and she was exhausted. It showed, her face looked grey and more lined than usual.

Not complaining, not really. But trying to understand how she got where she is now mired.

Yesterday, being Saturday, a day including time for leisure for many people, combined with the fact that the temperature had risen appreciably albeit under a heavily overcast sky, there were quite a few people from the neighbourhood out in our local urban forest, walking their dogs. Some we recognize and have a long-standing, or alternately short acquaintance with. Others are entirely new to us, and it's interesting to see them with their companion dogs out enjoying the atmosphere in the wooded ravine.

The snow we had experienced earlier in the week has pretty well melted, there's very little of it remaining. What we do have now is fairly wet and mucky trails, given the overnight frost and the subsequently-relatively-mild day-time highs. Nothing, however, much takes away from the pleasantness of being out in the fresh air and watching the birds: woodpeckers, cardinals, chickadees and nuthatches, fly in and around the trees.

There was one little dog, whom we had never before seen. A tiny white mix between a toy poodle and a bichon frise, even smaller than our toy poodle Riley, animated and excited beyond repression; he was up and about, around and under everything, happy to be alive and to be able to experience all the interesting smells, sounds and sights that the forested ravine offers to anyone interested enough to enter its valued precincts any season of the year.

My husband likes to use his mini laptop to listen live to news, debates and other types of programs on National Public Radio out of Boston, considering its international news coverage and quality of programming superior to that of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. There are some programs he particularly likes, among them a rather casual Saturday-evening presentation about cooking. Last Saturday, because American Thanksgiving was fast approaching, there was an item about a type of raisin pie that appears to be a favourite for that holiday.

This pie, and its ingredients - sour cream, sugar, various spices, eggs and raisins - appealed to my husband. Mind, for our own Canadian celebration of Thanksgiving, more than a month before the American one, nothing could replace his all-time favourite; pumpkin pie. But he was certainly curious about the recipe and looked it up, then assigned me the voluntary task of baking it the following Friday. Which I did. The finished product was nice enough and tasty enough, but I still think the traditional raisin pie I bake is superior, though we did enjoy this one for Friday-night dessert.

What I did enjoy on Friday morning was his company in our kitchen. While I set about making an ordinary bread dough - to be refrigerated until put to use the following evening, for a pizza crust - and pie-baking, and putting on our usual Friday-evening chicken soup, he busied himself at the same time putting together the constituents for a pumpernickel bread, to be baked in his newly-acquired bread-making machine. The resulting loaf was plump, moist, flavourful and exceedingly edible, as we discovered on Saturday morning.

She never fails to greet us warmly, in an intimate manner, as though we are quite personal friends. And, I suppose, in a way, we are. From the time we first met when she initiated close contact to the present, she knows some details of our lives, through enquiry, and we know some of hers, although we are less likely to enquire than she is.

She is far more open than we are, perhaps it represents a social part of her culture. We tend to be more reserved in that sense, although we are open to those such as she, rare though they are in our lives, who have no ulterior motive other than friendship.

Her smile is wide and pleasant although there remains an air of gravity about her. She has alive, warm, but tired brown eyes, not entirely unlike our own. And very high cheekbones, a common physical characteristic of Somalians.

There is an easy familiarity between us of equals in society - as it should be, but she still refers to me as "madam", on occasion, and that creates an aura of separation which has me feeling quite uncomfortable. She never fails to enquire delicately about a situation in our family that has been of ongoing concern to us.

We visited the Sally Ann earlier this week, which is where she works. Where she has worked for well over a decade. She lives quite far from this area and travels a long time and distance on public transit, back and forth to her place of employment. She could, because she has seniority, ask for a transfer to another branch, closer to where she lives, but she will not, she says, because she is accustomed to working here, and prefers to continue to do so.

Her husband is out of work and looking for employment somewhere, anywhere, to be busy and to continue to earn a living. Theirs will be a quiet holiday time, this year. Not that this particular holiday has any significance to her.

But they are troubled about the chaos in their homeland, the continuing drought leading to food shortages and dreadful famine. And the violence that continues to conflict her country. One of her husband's cousins, she confided, has been kidnapped.

They have managed to get together the required amount to ransom him - her large extended family. And they hope that they will be successful in trading his life for the sum that they have gathered to rescue him.