Wind gusts up to 45 km/h are making the temperature feel like -26°C.  Driving along the Appleton Side Road earlier today would have been tolerable had not the wind irreligiously blown scours of blustery snow from the adjacent stubbled field across what might otherwise have been clear, dry pavement but which now were parallel arctic rivers of packed and hardened snow. Nonetheless I refused to abandon my Canadian resolve, a pertinacity to the erstwhile familiarity of childhood and teenage years, building snowmen and tobogganing, skating the Rideau Canal, skiing Mount Temple, bravely succumbing to its restraint, its modification, oppression and opportunities, to winter.

It occurred to me that I may indeed adopt the dogma as more than a short-term palliative. Had I the foresight to bolt myself to the iron?  Was I obliged to reduce the former dream to a passing whimsy? Agitating one’s historic roots to the extent of having to remove oneself from the foreground hardly seems the most desirable chronicle philosophically or otherwise. But it doesn’t matter what I think. Nor what I may feel.  This is neither an intellectual nor an emotional controversy. The blisteringly stark trees and dried branches, like thinning hair, paint an irrefutable image against the lacklustre horizon. And yet…there is a persuasion, maybe not a constancy but an acknowledgment. Plain thinking starts with concession and forfeit.

Always I have given one for another. Mockingly I call myself bipolar, a mental disorder I metaphorically embrace only to capture its likeness to extremities.  There is unfailingly a difference, axons, positive and negative charge carriers. But of necessity there is only one vote. Each in turn leads to another. Never have I been disappointed (or, should I say, have I allowed myself to be so). My friend Bobby B echoed the sentiment today as he cycled about Naples, Florida while chatting with me on the telephone. His is a vigorous and flamboyant personal history, admittedly marked favourably by fate, an admission not a condescension.

The late afternoon sunlight upon the snow softens to blue. Shadows between the rows of cornstalk stubble deepen. In the meadow the crumbling wooden outbuilding darkens. Soon another day will have dissolved. My friend Prof. Daniel L in Paris, France this morning initiated a conversation about musical copyright in an era of digitalization. We were prompted by the scope of artificial intelligence, currents like governing themes that animate us, carrying the blurs and minutiae of unrecognizable organisms, fabrications of astral influence.

I saw a woman bundled against the cold, walking into the declining sunlight.