Since last November 2nd when we unloaded our domestic possessions at Riverfront Estates, it has been a cycle of change and anticipation as we have sought to complete the establishment our new residential platform.  Granted the alteration from 100 Jamieson Street to 225 Johanna Street was temporarily thwarted by our jaunt to Key Largo for six months. But now we are once again completing the annual cycle. This means finalizing the routine rituals; viz., annual physical checkups, teeth cleanings and check-ups; eye examinations; hearing aid check-ups; and in this instance managing a new left knee replacement.

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I should have known something was off beam when I awoke after 5:00 o’clock this morning without having already taken my usual handful of analgesics. This was a signal to me that I had survived an uncharacteristically long period of both dormancy and abeyance since my last dose. What made it more curious was that, knowing this suspension, I determined nonetheless to hang fire. I would reserve whatever palliative there was for a later moment (an admittedly unusual accommodation and deprivation on my part). Objection to anodyne is not normally something I undertake for any disputed purpose. My incarnation does not derive its strength from long-endured abstraction.

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There is I suspect a lot of ambitious though shiftless chat on the internet about Midsummer, no doubt some of it concerning its putatively lascivious nature and its patent evolution from springtime and rebirth and the multitude of poetic details arising from Nature’s calendar contribution to our daily life experience. The depth of enquiry may allude for example to moderately disturbing assertions similar to those surrounding the May pole and school children dancing around it.

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It is fairly assured that before I undertake even something as quotidian as a late afternoon mug of chilled espresso coffee while perched at my writing desk overlooking the meandering Mississippi River I shall succeed to invest the daily enterprise with sufficient personal option to warrant an attribution beyond nondescript or mundane. There percolates from within the agricultural panorama a variety of colours, birds and plants.  Already portions of the realm are blotted by ramblng vegetation and row-upon-row of cultivated seeds. It is a long-awaited sequel to a lifetime devoted to bog-standard. I have always preferred the brushes of colour from weeds in the field or along the side of a dusty country road; and the placid river water, capturing blotches of shimmering reflection.

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Father’s Day is Sunday, June 18th, 2023. Whether or not you still have a living father to whom to accredit your habits, good and bad, appearance and traits of personality, more likely than not some of the recognition – perhaps at times even more than we care to acknowledge – evolves from the paternal influence. Curiously much of the parental mastery goes predominantly unnoticed for much of the child’s existence at least until late in life. But eventually we all awaken to the indisputable defining characteristics, some of which may broaden further than we would prefer to have imagined. It is indeed true that “what is bred in the bone will out in the flesh”.

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The magical return to home is never to be underestimated! Suddenly all that insinuates our complicated entirety is blended together uniformly. No doubt we confound ourselves that enough of the wallpaper persists; that our erstwhile estrangement from family and friends is rejuvenated by unforeseen elemental features. Home sweet home is a quixotic yet realistic opiate.

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From the moment I awakened this morning – which is to say, 2:30 am, 4:46 am, 6:40 am and lastly about 10:10 am – I have harboured this inexplicable hesitancy about the upcoming day. It’s not as though there were any particular oddity or singularity about the day.  In fact it was just one of those elemental days on which I was scheduled for yet another medical appointment, this time with Dr. Sameer Dedhar (optometrist) for my annual check-up and prescription review. We’re clearly lucky to have the opportunity to visit upon these and other impending medical issues.  Yet the rising urgency of the need resulting from contemporaneous aging, decomposition and susceptibility has jaundiced the unpredicted repetition of the allotment. Now that it’s over, that I have achieved this further pinnacle of medical complascency, I’m feeling it’s almost Friday.  Clever of me to have booked today’s appointment in the middle of June, late in a burgeoning summer afternoon on a Thursday, close enough to week’s end to preserve application and assiduity in the workplace while signalling the entitlement to early evaporation for another of those agreeable long weekends in the summer. Evaporation and exhaustion from all that compels our purpose.

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Every day the entire image before my eyes changes. On April 27th (when we arrived here) the springtime composition of the surrounding territory was only beginning.  Yet how speedily it accelerates! In a matter of six weeks, by casually regarding the upriver prospect and the 25-acre parcels of agricultural lands stretching from the nearby country road to the shoreline, we have witnessed a bountiful transformation from seed to bloom. The carpet upon the fields has remodelled itself from satiny silk to lush woollen tapestry; the yellow blossoms of flowers in every nook and cranny punctuate their especial clamour; the shoreline, though still palpable, has been noticeably altered during the Spring Freshet; the trees are indescribably lush.

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When I returned home this afternoon following my ritual or should I say, my ceremonial drive to Stittsville and back for an automotive outing and a purgative car wash, laden with a large (and frankly replete) unmarked brown paper bag containing Beckwith Kitchen biscuits, buttertarts and homemade soups, the patio door was conveniently ajar, the new sliding screen door in its place. The screen door represents the acme of installation; viz., instantly workable (magnetic lock), easily managed and an astonishingly matchable appearance. One of the many features of this new apartment building which extracts my unrestrained approbation, things which in a different context promote instead recollection of inutility or recurring frustration.

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impeccable | imˈpekəb(ə)l | adjective (of behavior, performance, or appearance) in accordance with the highest standards of propriety; faultless

ORIGIN mid 16th century (in the theological sense): from Latin impeccabilis, from in- ‘not’ + peccare ‘to sin’.

There is seemingly no distinct (or meaningful) juncture of transition from springtime to summer apart from the Summer Solstice that historically marks the onset of summer at the time of the longest day, about June 21 in the northern hemisphere and December 22 in the southern hemisphere.

The Summer Solstice this year is Wednesday, June 21 at 10:57 am. The summer solstice, also called the festival solstice or midsummer, occurs when one of Earth’s poles has its maximum tilt toward the Sun. It happens twice yearly, once in each hemisphere.

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