Hard to believe it's October already, but that nostalgic time of year is upon us, we're reminded when we smell the acridity of leaves falling, view the magnificence of autumn-coloured trees, experience shorter daylight hours, hear geese off in the distant sky, honking, flying in formation, and hear the sounds of smaller wings and shrill cries of smaller birds making their epic fall departure flying throughout the night hours to southern climes.

October is the month when two of our children were born.  It's a month that always seems to creep up behind us, taking us by surprise.  We've sent off birthday cards to the boys with the modest financial gifts we usually send them, a mere token of our love for them.  One may arrive in time, before our youngest leaves Vancouver for his trip to Toronto, then Montreal, and then to see us for five days. 

In Toronto he will visit with his brother and sister-in-law and with some long-time friends.  Then on to Montreal to sit on a doctoral committee.  And then to Ottawa, to spend some time with us.  He's just come back from a week's trip to Colorado where he took part in a scientific enquiry revolving about the fish habitat in the Colorado River, in part of the Grand Canyon.  I anticipate some very beautiful photographs will accompany him.

Hard to believe that our oldest son is approaching fifty-three, our youngest forty-nine, with our daughter sandwiched between.  It seems only yesterday that we were ourselves so amazed that we had reached the half-century mark ourselves.

Ottawa is a beautiful city, easy to live in, to access parks and a green environment with its broad greenbelt.  Driving along the Eastern Parkway alongside the broad Ottawa River to arrive at downtown Ottawa reminds us of the peaceful and tranquil drive around Washington, D.C. although we are far more comfortably familiar with our own.  Washington has the distinction of being a site of many national monuments and public museums and art galleries.  Ottawa doesn't do too poorly in that department, as a much smaller nation with one-tenth the population of the United States.

Along Wellington Street, before the national monuments that are the Parliament Buildings and other government institutions, monuments honouring our war dead, the National Mint, National Gallery, and architectural focuses like the Chateau Laurier and the old Ottawa Railway Station, now a Conference Centre alongside newer ones with window curtain walls leaning over the Rideau Canal, there is much to look at and admire, including the Library and Archives and Supreme Court buildings, the new War Museum.

But at this time of year it is the presence of mature trees that overwhelm the senses, travelling from the Eastern to the Western Parkway, glimpsing the gushing waters of the Rideau Falls and the sites of old rapids reminding us of etchings contained in Picturesque Canada, where the river is dotted with Canada Geese resting on their flight south, and trees have turned orange, red and yellow, that enthrall the senses. 

It's a sleek, tiny creature with bright, inquisitive eyes.  At a distance, easily overlooked if it were not that the tall man holding it had his arm crooked, and a slender leash hanging down, swaying as he walked.  As the distance between us closed my husband recognized the man and realized that he was carrying his little weasel.  We had seen them both on several occasions over the years.  Although the first time had been with another little animal, since gone, and this was its replacement.

Dogs, he tells us, even very large ones come up close to sniff the weasel and none of them exhibit any kind of hostility to it, in his experience.  Sometimes the dog owners are alarmed, calling their dogs off, but he calms their fears.  Dogs obey him, he said, with a grin, where they often ignore whatever their owners direct them to do.  They sit docilely at his feet, and he allows them to smell the little creature who itself exhibits no fear.

He carries it when the occasion demands, when they're approaching a situation he cannot fully anticipate.  Otherwise, the very small, and quite beautiful little animal prefers to wander along on its own, on leash.  The leash is its outdoor companion; occasionally the weasel will insist, and the man will allow it to wander off in the underbrush, leash trailing.  He has not yet had an occurrence that he couldn't control.

And because of its great curiosity, it becomes readily bored, so that they tend to wander off to other exploration opportunities rather than to return to the same woodland trails time and again, which explains the few times we've come across them previously.  Winter or summer, they venture out together; when snow is on the ground the little weasel prefers to burrow through it than attempt to clamber over it.

It has an intense curiosity about everything surrounding it, including me, sniffing my hands in rapid sniffing motions, looking up at me, scrutinizing details about me that I cannot imagine might be of any interest to a creature faced with another of nature's creations when there is such a size disparity.  What might it be thinking?

One more time when I regretted not having my handy little digital camera with me.

I don't generally notice details.  My husband is a great observer, unlike me.  Very little passes beyond his notice.  I attribute that trait in him to his mind, forever curious, and his artistic, creative penchant for details.  As for me, I remain fairly oblivious to much that goes on around me.  Most particularly when I am busy doing something that demands my close attention.

Last time I was at the supermarket doing the food shopping I did notice someone.  A young woman in her early-to-mid 20s.  She was elegantly slim, her burnished hair tied back in an attractive pony-tail showing off the fine contours of her very pretty face.  Casually dressed and with care, she wore tight pants and stiletto heels.

It wasn't what she wore or how she looked that took my attention, though.  I happened to be in the personal hygiene aisle, musing over shampoo labels on sale that day.  She, behind me, was focused on shelves of emollients, creams, beauty products that I never look at.  And it was what she was engaged in that caught me short.  She, on the other hand, was so engrossed in what she was doing that she seemed oblivious to my presence.  I stood there, watching her as she carefully considered the products visually, then lifted one after another off the shelf, to unscrew their tops, break the seals and perform a sniff test.

Nothing seemed to rise to the occasion of her aroma search, so she just kept replacing the opened products and selecting others.  I was fascinated and aghast, but did a mental shrug and moved on.  I've been thinking about that ever since.  That I should have pointed out to her that what she was engaged in was pure vandalism.  She was negating the value of those products by pillaging their sterile condition for her personal satisfaction.

On other occasions I have spoken to people, but not too often, not since it became illegal and widely known that people should not be smoking in the confines of a supermarket, nor for that matter anywhere else where their habit would both disturb and cause damage to others' state of health.  This young woman was doing just that in her own way; destructive and wanton.

In retrospect it seems obvious to me now that this is a routine she must often engage in.  And obviously one that no one else has called her on.  Pity that I wasn't the one to break the mold.

So after all it was a cyst that had somehow developed a decade earlier subcutaneously on my abdominal wall.  And it was that cyst that, for the third time during that period manifested its presence by becoming infected, swelling to alarming proportions (relatively speaking) and causing this latest little episode for which I had little option but to pursue medical care. 

The morning after my failed attempt to have the resulting abscess drained at the Urgent Care Centre when my personal physician who "doesn't do that" referred me to the centre with an inadequate referral protocol, I appeared there again.  I arrived at eleven in the morning, departed after three in the afternoon.  When I arrived the waiting room was only half-full; a half-hour later it was teeming with people all awaiting their turn to be called.  Oddly enough I realized that there were few older people present, most were considerably younger, and some quite young, people in their 20s, teens, children.

When eventually my number came up the receptionist went in search of the fax that had twice been requested of my doctor's office, and there was nothing.  She looked at the scribbled referral on the prescription form my doctor had handed to me the day before and said, unlike her predecessor of yesterday that there was no reason it couldn't be accepted as a proper referral, and a doctor she conferred with concurred.

Duly registered for treatment, I sat again in the waiting room for another hour.  When the sole nurse on duty that day (short-handed they were) called my name she directed me to an examining room saying she would return shortly.  'Shortly', unfortunately turned out to be another two-thirds of an hour.  After her brief examination including taking my temperature, she left, apologizing for the long wait, telling me that the doctor would be with me 'shortly'.

'Shortly' once again became a relative and understated term, but once he did arrive, the doctor answered all my questions good-naturedly as he set about examining then draining the abscess.  A common enough occurrence he said, that people as they aged particularly would develop a cyst, and the cyst would become periodically inflamed then infected as mine was.  He recommended I have it surgically removed, some months hence.

During our conversation he revealed that he was 72 years of age.  A genial, somewhat corpulent, and obviously technically competent physician, continuing to use his brains and the expertise he had acquired over the years satisfied his needs.  He mentioned as well that one of his colleagues at the clinic was 78 years old.  So much for the debilitation of old age in those who decline the presumed excesses of the aging process, when they are able to.

He cleaned up the area and packed it, and informed me I would have to return in two days' time to have the packing removed, the wound assessed as to whether a fresh packing would be required, or not.  And then I was released to the fresh air, my waiting husband and our little dog, all of us anxious to set out on our regular ravine perambulation.

I was decidedly unhappy to find myself in the large, crowded waiting room of an Urgent Care Clinic yesterday afternoon, where I spent several frustrating and inconclusive hours awaiting treatment.   Others waiting there patiently to be seen by a medical professional had, like me, no visible sign of medical distress.  Other than the children, harshly coughing, and adults sneezing.  Obviously, like a hospital itself, not the most germ-free of environments.

Ten years ago I had noticed, on my midriff, what looked very much like a spider bite.  It was a small swelling which, over the succeeding days, became progressively larger and more swollen. And, as well, irritated.  Until it also became infected, and at that point painful to the touch. 

Considering it a minor matter, I didn't go the geographic distance to our family doctor located where we had once lived for twenty years, instead choosing to go to a neighbourhood walk-in medical clinic.  Where the doctor there heard me out, looked at the thing, tch-tched, then wiped a knife across it, drained it, bandaged it, wrote out a prescription for anti-biotic and sent me on my way.

Since then, that same kind of episode has twice re-occurred.  On the second occasion, at another walk-in clinic, the doctor did the same thing.  A week ago, from the very same area, another bump began emerging, became enlarged steadily, red and angry, then appeared to be infected. 

This time I made an appointment to see my (new) family doctor (the old one having retired).  This new doctor, a young, stylish woman whose accented patter I can barely decipher looked at the thing, confirmed it was abscessed, and said she doesn't "do" such things.  Obviously no spider bite, but something lodged subcutaneously that erupts occasionally.

She described for me the pattern of treatment that would have to be undertaken, precisely what had been done formerly at those walk-in clinics and informed me that I would have to attend the nearby urgent care clinic to get someone there to do something fairly routine which she doesn't "do".  She scribbled a referral on a prescription pad, handed it to me to show to the clinic.  Then took my blood pressure, and unsurprisingly, it was higher than normal.

Which was how I ended up at the clinic.  The good news is that the clinic is handily close, right in our neighbourhood.  The bad news (for me) was that the receptionist would not recognize the scribbled prescription note as a referral - and this after I'd waited for an hour just to get to the reception desk; a numbered, first-come protocol at that busy place.

The receptionist obligingly called my doctor's office and asked that a proper referral be faxed over to allow them to proceed because OHIP cannot be billed twice on the same day for the same person seeing two separate doctors for one single cause without a proper referral.  A wait of an hour ensued, after which the receptionist placed that call and request again.

At which point I just walked out, infection intact, when after another half-hour wait no fax had arrived.

Another set of stained glass windows are now in the process of being designed.  Usually my husband shows me the first of the cartoons he puts together in the search for a creative design that we will both find pleasing.  This time, nothing of the sort.  He sequestered himself downstairs in his workshop, stretched out a long piece of blank drawing paper to the equivalent size of each window and began the process.  Beside him lay books and magazines opened to inspirational paintings.

Days later when curiosity finally drove me to observe what he had so far created, what I saw rather surprised me.  It was the careful drawing in great detail of a moose, its massive size and antlers dominating a landscape.  It was beautifully crafted, and I told him so.  I also reminded him of my reaction to any paintings I've ever seen that featured moose, and he laughed, admitting that this is why he hadn't bothered consulting me. 

He views the topic as a challenge to his stained-glass creativity and he was anxious to see if he could surmount any technical difficulties he might encounter along the way.  He was consulting various paintings and using them as inspiration for what he was carefully placing on paper.  With the bull moose, he said, there will be a female counterpart on the facing window.  Pairs are often shown together, he explained.

These windows are to be placed atop the first-level windows in the family room, not yet covered with stained glass.  Where the first-level windows have been devoted to the Canadian landscape and birds typical of that landscape, quite unlike more exotic windows that have been installed in the living room side of the house.

This will doubtless represent my husband's major project during the coming winter of 2012-13.