On a Friday before the start of a long weekend (Labour Day), it is our customary habit to remain in situ. We haven’t the urge to join the anticipated throngs on the highways or elsewhere as they traffic from one place to another. It does besides seem usefully compromising on our part to avoid adding to the circulation if we haven’t any present need to do so. Nonetheless I cannot deny the pleasure I derive from recollecting the exuberance once associated with September 1st. It always heralded an excitement as we launched into another Indian Summer and the innumerable pastimes attached to the upcoming autumnal season.

This afternoon by contrast was a stay-at-home day.  Bunny dropped by for what we had anticipated to be a fairly short visit but which turned into almost three hours of gabbing.  Seemingly we had a lot to get off our chest.  And of course there were the usual story-tellings common to each of us in our own way. The real celebration though was Bunny’s upcoming 85th birthday in a matter of four days. She has already planned a family gathering on Sunday so our expression of good wishes today was not without its timeliness.

Meanwhile we focussed ourselves upon our own resolutions for the upcoming year. In the spirit of investigation we spoke with our estate agent on Hilton Head Island today to switch our accommodation from Wagon Road to the end of S. Sea Pines Drive to Lands End Court along Braddock Cove near the mouth of Calibogue Sound. It is at the toe of Hilton Head Island or the tip of its scorpion tail. We’re familiar with the area, having previously stayed at South Beach Club and Beachside Tennis Villas. And of course the North Atlantic Ocean and the magnificent 12-mile beach is immediately at hand.

Even today at the car wash a young attendant advised he was planning a trip in November. It speaks to the custom of Canadians generally to plan such vacations. Plus I forgot to mention that Bunny too is scheduled to depart to Morocco for three months about the same time.

Yet notwithstanding the frivolity of travel (about which I have no doubt we shall hear a great deal more tomorrow afternoon at my erstwhile physician’s family gathering to celebrate the visit of his daughter and her clan from Australia) being tranquil for the moment is for me at least exceedingly suitable. Oddly enough after having spent almost the last fifty years in Almonte, I am only now discovering its hidden elixirs which are daily percolating to the surface.  It is unquestionably a reflection of my own happily subdued state of mind.  It evinces the complete gratification I derive from the images which daily unfold before me, changing as often and as dynamically as the weather and the passage of the sun. It is a convenient metaphor.