In the burrow

It’s Saturday morning.  Outside it’s not especially cheery.  The sky is dull and grey, crystals of snow softly falling under a still dome upon the stubble in the  brown fields beyond. There is just enough sunlight to luminate the overwhelming grey to a dull yellow tint. Thanks to Apple Music© I am listening to Fauré’s Requiem, Charles Dutoit conducting l’Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal. It is part of what Apple labels my “Station“, an algorithm of my favourite composers from the library. Yet another example of the sorcery of technology!

Inside we’re cuddled among our favourite things. It is a calculated mixture of surplusage and convenience. Within these binary extremes we’ve managed to maintain the bedrock of the past fifty years while at the same time capturing the utility of furniture, both the product and the position. When setting up a place – no matter whether a grand home or a small apartment such as we now have – the pertinent objective is not the demonstration of things but the profitability of their arrangement for others to see and converse. It was a lesson I comically learned from my friend L. C. Audette, QC OC who one evening demonstrated the scheme by first draining the whiskey from his highball, calling me a pusillanimous bastard for resisting his proposal, then assisting me to move the Steinway grand piano and rearrange the wing chairs and side tables! It was a perfection we never altered until the house sold!

It is so easy to complicate life by overlooking immediate necessities. Indeed for many years when I had numerous affairs to handle I governed myself by the rule that I must first complete what had to be done before moving to more pleasurable activity. Clearly this was primarily a logistical tactic not one motivated by intelligence. It nonetheless proved the additional theory that success is 90 per cent perspiration and 10 per cent inspiration.

Another thing I long ago learned: get everything you can out of the present because invariably it  is more dynamic than you at first imagined. I say this in particular because it is our hope that next year this time we’ll be on Key Largo.  Meanwhile I intend to harvest everything I can this winter, the first in many years and – as has been suggested by a family friend – possibly the last in our lifetime.