While not everything today is functioning as it should, neither is the inconvenience overly disturbing. It is no doubt just another of those trifling matters requiring stock maintenance. I’ll deal with it on Monday next when the office opens for the business week. I’ve sent an email requesting an appointment. The rest however is unequivocally ideal – the winding corridors of tree lined country roads, blue sky with mountains of white clouds, the river a majestic shiny blue, the air breezy, dry and cool.

The instant I emerged from the subterranean garage earlier this morning, the windows down, headed along my customary trajectory, Madama Butterfly echoing my substance and spiritual incorporeality, I was soon comfortably adjusted to the modest wayfaring, smugly relishing the SuperCruise floating along the up and down highway.

At Neat Café in Burnstown, Renfrew County, I sat alone in the sunshine on the end of a greying wooden picnic table, staring into the fathomless sky, munching my nourishing Breakfast Cookie, sipping an invigorating quad espresso. The place was stirring with Saturday morning conversation.  Young children bouncing alongside determined parents. I exchanged greetings with Mark Enright, Prop. who was pursuing his agricultural duties by planting and watering several large wooden boxes of earth.

Afterwards upon returning home – as a prelude to another caffeine infusion at local Equator Coffee – we engaged ourselves with Sarina at Bayview Lodge Resort (and with our beloved county friends Bruce and Graham) for an upcoming boating expedition on nearby White Lake. The small-scale nautical adventure represents for me a significant triumph.  It hearkens back a year or more when we first undertook a similar outing – though then without the benefit of Proof of Competency from the National Boating Safety School; that is, the Pleasure Craft Operator Card. I am gloatingly proud of that cogency. It is my vicarious maritime legitimacy. It is too compensation for having unforgivably by-passed a genuine sailing expedition many years ago on the North Atlantic Ocean in Nova Scotia when my personal ambitions collided and were ironically interrupted like a pathway to Heaven with two staircases, both admirable, both memorable, yet each singular and apart. The past – thus replete though restrained – is yet lately, much lately, complemented. I bow to the serendipity, reflecting as it does the unparalleled and unimaginable travels over decades.