What I have always found agreeable about gold is that it is small, manageable and exquisite. Lately – that is, upon having moved into this small, manageable and exquisite apartment – I have been rethinking all that there is about gold and where to find it and how to extract it.  Extraordinarily I find myself concluding – with the most frugal of affirmative expostulation and persuasiveness – that we are sitting on a gold mine. Before I venture further explanatory detail, allow me first to give a brief but critical background to the exploration.

Commensurately with this seeming epiphany my terribly learned and perspicacious partner Denis has for the past several months (coincidentally aligned with our return from Hilton Head Island last March) promoted what in spite of my moderately disguised resistance is a material alteration of our erstwhile winter sojourns over the past decade.  First and foremost is his equally undisguised kicking upstairs of a limitation upon the duration of our absence from the northern hearth. Evidently those days are over. His proposition has been unfailingly to reduce the international stays to 30 – 45 days (which likely corresponds by no accident with the length of absence from Canada which is within the scope of a new health insurance package that in turn arose contemporaneously with Denis’ advancement to the dignified age of 70 years). This modified health care plan permits us to withdraw from Canadian soil any number of times throughout the year provided that we constrain each vacation to no more than 45 days. Formerly we bought insurance that covered us without limitation for the entire year (but as you might have guessed the price jumped remarkably upon aging).

While your instant reaction may be that one can simply travel back and forth to preserve compatibility with the insurance mandate, Denis has translated the inconvenience to embrace a new category of travel, one which rather than focussing only upon the enlargement of time stresses instead the option of venues and nature of enterprise. To be more succinct, Denis has distilled our dalliance by importing the imperative for diminution as a feature of approbation. Basically, shorter is better when it comes to having the sensation of vacation (which otherwise is tainted by blending in with the wallpaper and merely doing regular domestic chores).  To appreciate this qualification one must understand that Denis tends to preoccupy himself with the mechanics of a residence if we’re there for prolonged periods.  The first thing he does upon arriving at a new place of residence is to investigate every possible mechanical feature. This of course is a good thing but by the same admission it is a tendency which violates and disrupts the purely furlough element of the transaction. Some things can become tarsome!

In any event this rather fertile explanation of the nurturing effect upon me of this change in travel plans has had the sequel of forcing me to address what in my own mind are spiritually similar postulations which I have evidently been reluctant to acknowledge because they enforce some dramatic though necessary owning up. Paramount is my incremental physical limitations. To be blunt, my shopping days are now limited to Amazon on-line.  Getting from the bedroom to the bathroom is a challenge.  In other words, mobility is in the past tense.  While you may well laugh at the retail confinement, it constitutes a significant limitation of what was formerly (though clearly unwittingly) a manifestly key feature of my life.  Let me put it this way, I knew my way down the aisles of more than one shop at Shelter Cove Plaza on Hilton Head Island, everything from clothes to eye wear to shoes.  And it was all stuff that I loved!  But those days are gone.

It isn’t only adjustment to shopping that has blemished the erstwhile winter sojourns.  Nor even the the threat of cancer.  It isn’t sunshine that frightens me; rather it is the way I look in a bathing suit!  Planting oneself beside a pool in order to bake to a crisp is hardly becoming at my age!  Better instead to adopt Mrs. Doreen Dougall’s unwritten principle to avoid contaminating one’s pale prescriptive flesh.

So where does this get me?  Well, it is not merely the vulgar necessity to accommodate one’s age and inability.  What has happened by the oddest of evolutions is that my entire life is now marked by unending elevation. By having to face these incontrovertible alterations I am allowed to dwell solely upon what suits me.  No longer am I obliged to search for the most fortuitous result of my behaviour. I am permitted instead to dwell to my heart’s content upon what stimulates me without addressing time or space.  I might usefully add too that the question of money is now somewhat irrelevant because there is nothing I wish (or, more pointedly, need) to have; there nothing I could buy which would succeed to soften or change my life beyond the scope of a moment or two at best. Simply put, there is only so much I can eat; there is only so far I can tricycle or drive; there is indisputable qualification upon what I can do as a diversion.

Now I realize this may sound to be a submission. But it is not. It is a clarification; and like any other clarification it comes with the unintended advantage of removing clouds and particles of annoyance. And lest I appropriate to myself my own capacity for change, I am quick to acknowledge as well the inexpressible beauty of what is at hand.  Too often I know I go on and on about the majesty of the upriver view from my desk; or the marvel of the afternoon sunshine from the balcony; or the indeterminable luck of partnership with Denis; or my precious family and friends.  But it all matters.  And as I narrow my scope to define the detail, it astonishingly enlarges the meaning. The gold that is small, manageable and exquisite is of unparalleled size, expanse and quality.