Since last November 2nd when we unloaded our domestic possessions at Riverfront Estates, it has been a cycle of change and anticipation as we have sought to complete the establishment our new residential platform.  Granted the alteration from 100 Jamieson Street to 225 Johanna Street was temporarily thwarted by our jaunt to Key Largo for six months. But now we are once again completing the annual cycle. This means finalizing the routine rituals; viz., annual physical checkups, teeth cleanings and check-ups; eye examinations; hearing aid check-ups; and in this instance managing a new left knee replacement.

Don’t ask me why, but this morning as I idly contemplated my future, it occurred to me that things had begun to sort themselves out, that if nothing else the frequency of meetings was on the wane, that we had at last managed to reduce our on-going necessities to the mundane renewal of one’s licence plate registration, that the larger imperatives of establishing a new residential format and managing a left knee replacement were finally nearing exhaustion.

Getting here has been a pursuit of daily consequence. Nor is the fermentation yet complete. It is hardly insightful to observe that the transition to new digs is an enterprise which I suspect unwittingly invokes many hitherto unawakened deliberations. Merely adjusting to the new colour of the paint on the walls is an adventure for one’s artistic persona. And then there is the height of the walls; and the floor-to-ceiling windows; and, dare I ignore it, the outdoor patio and the upriver view from the 2nd floor. It is a recurring theme of the relocation to impress particles of the new puzzle in a broadening, recoverable, recognizable image from which we are no longer distant but rather within which we are delightfully subsumed. Surely blending with the wallpaper is a distinction which characterizes being on home territory.

In any event there is no turning back. I say this not in the least to prejudice my overall contentment with the way things have gone; rather to recall that this thing we call life is a short slide.  As far as what constitutes uphill or downhill is pure serendipity. Somehow in the past I have been able to blend my anima with the translation or interpretation of life rendered to me. This speaks to my pragmatism.