Though the weather forecast was open skies the snowplow hadn’t yet cleared the Appleton Side Road. I met the truck coming in the opposite direction. My side of the highway remained covered in snow, making the driving feel uncertain. Accordingly I turned onto Patterson Street. It was a welcome and broadly plowed dirt road which comfortably led me back to town – but not before I paused on the side of the road to snap some photos of the old wooden rail fence at the corner of the former Robertson farm. I have always been enchanted by rail fences. Not in the tradition of “good fences, good neighbours”; rather, artistically, approaching architecture. Its personality is inevitably enhanced by muted grey colours, an overgrowth of winding, leafy trails and a proximity to perfectly situated trees and underbrush.

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Though not entirely novel, it is, I can safely say, nonetheless uncommon that I receive comment about what I have written. Recently I received a comment from Professor Daniel Laprès in Paris, France. Danny (as I am accustomed to call him) and I – together with “Butch” George K. Macintosh KC – were roommates together in a grand old house belonging to the convent on Spring Garden Road, Halifax while attending Dalhousie Law School in the early 1970s. To my recollection, Danny had the largest of the three bedrooms; I, the smallest.  Not that it matters.  It was a long time ago. Anyway…where was I?  Oh, yes, the comment from Danny.  Here it is:

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For the upcoming week in the Western World in particular (Hanukkah, Christmas, New Year) the focus is predominantly high spirits. The irrefutable description (though admittedly entangled with foreboding) is joyous and relieving, a state of keenness and gratification, the commingling of a fascination of endeavours and family and friends. It is a boisterous key to what is to come. Happiness, though a vague and indecisive term, nonetheless merits analysis and description. Not unlike other ambitions in life it captures ingredients, flavours and sensations which unwittingly describe our rudimentary nature, our proclivities, our aspirations.

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For today, Sunday, December 21, 2025, in Mississippi Mills, Ontario, there are approximately 8 hours and 47 minutes of daylight, marking the Winter Solstice for the Northern Hemisphere, the shortest day of the year.

While the celebrity of the Winter Solstice is its minority of sunshine, there are those such as I who prefer to distinguish it as the beginning of plenitude. Generally my instinct, when adapting to change, is to consider it a done matter and then look prosaically though confidently at what is to come. For me, getting in tune with the seasonal changes this year has highlighted not only the wonder of the transitions but also their precipitous character. Perhaps it is only the coincidence of these alterations with my accelerating old age that propels me to view the world with increased speed, revolution and evolution, including the metaphoric and natural determinations of living and dying, life and death, coming and going, from the sky to the earth and everything in between.

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Now is as good a time as any to address the matter of Artificial Intelligence (AI); that is, before we launch officially into the New Year when all our resolutions come into effect. For the past year (2025) I have been consumed with an expanding familiarity with AI, mostly prompted by my own narrow resources.  Initially I was restricted by limited interpretation of AI possibilities notwithstanding ChatGPT’s invitation to, “Ask me anything!” Overall I have confined my introduction to AI to the realm of “refining” my own literary compositions, or creating a fiction based upon my own summary details (not a hugely successful endeavour to my thinking); and, to the production of images based upon my written ingredients (or, in the case of the Featured image, based upon an old photo of me from 1976).

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The addictive bewitchment of travel – its hued romanticism, the memorable enchantment of windswept beaches and thatched rooftop restaurants on open jagged rock by the sea, sandy passages wending along the frothing shore of an endless ocean, a distant horizon to nowhere and everywhere – these images of once boundless fortuity have begun to dissolve, evoking a fabric of reality more crucial for its estrangement from native land and substance. The enthusiasm of getting there is superseded by the peril of leaving. The inevitability of recognition exceeds the myth of discovery. The lonely avenues of circus entertainment, void of the hysteria of imagination and performance, retreat to the plain ambition of temporary diversity, its ferris wheels and rotating gondolas suspended in time.

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Conundrum at the North Pole

(Refined version)

The elves were having an awful time of it. The conveyor belt on which rode teddy bears, model cars, train sets, smart phones, dolls, dollhouses, and wind-up toys had jammed no fewer than three times already that morning—and it was only ten o’clock. Now it had jammed again, of all times, at the busiest point of the year.

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Marjorie liked Christmas Eve best when it did not insist on cheer.

From her armchair by the tall window, she watched the river slide past below—dark, slow, half-erased by fog. The day had never quite decided whether it was snow or rain; it hovered at that indecisive edge just above freezing, where the world feels held in suspension. She held her own small suspension in a cut-glass tumbler: Dry Sack sherry, poured carefully, the way she had learned to do everything carefully after a certain age.

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The Pembroke Regional Hospital in Pembroke, Ontario is distinctly part of the Ottawa Valley, the former timber run down the Ottawa River most notably from Renfrew County where the lumber barons are reputed to have achieved immense wealth.

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Chapter Eight — We leave to discover whence we come

What had begun as a matter of possession ended, as such things often do, as a matter of inheritance.

The painting did not so much arrive as consent to be seen. It stood where none of them remembered placing it, leaning slightly—as if tired—against the limewashed wall of Lavinia’s north room. Morning light found it without ceremony and revealed what candlelight had only suggested: gold laid thin as breath, lapis worn soft as dusk, a face rendered with such intimate restraint that none of them spoke for a long while.

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