Wandering

Last evening in anticipation of our housekeeper’s scheduled visit today we had fashioned that we’d brunch at the golf club this morning.  But that plan failed for lack of appetite. Not because we were not interested in food but because we had already had toast and porridge for breakfast and that naturally dampened scrutiny of anything as substantial as brunch. So instead of wandering along the Appleton Side Road as we had proposed, we redirected ourselves aimlessly in the opposite direction further adjacent the Mississippi River towards Renfrew County.

The alteration was a profitable decision.  It not only took us into a less frequented arena (and one in which the autumnal changes are already evident and resplendent), it afforded us the opportunity to reunite at Neat Café in Burnstown with Mark Enright (Proprietor) and also by coincidence with Harold McKay (Realtor), his wife and two other longstanding acquaintances from Almonte.

Neat Music and Coffee

Harold McKay Realtor

The ambience, service and food at Neat Café are outstandingly reliable and gratifying. We have stopped by whenever en route for nearby orchard produce or otherwise trooping unambitiously about the picturesque rural territory along the Madawaska River. Today’s caffeine interjection was no exception to the rule. The espresso was expertly contrived and rendered. It was obvious too that the marvellous autumnal weather contributed to the pervasive gusto evident in everyone else at the café. It was an ideal day to rehearse one’s convertible performance before exiting the stage once again for the upcoming winter months.

Later in the afternoon, after accomplishment of my ritual attendance at Halo® car wash in Stittsville and having exhausted my windswept cabin, I could no longer resist the seductive call of the early autumnal weather. I parked the car in the garage then immediately secured my grip upon the tricycle handles. To my delight I succeeded at full throttle to mount the incline from the garage to the street.  It was a mettlesome start to the outing!

Along my route I encountered a gentleman whom I’ve been anxious to meet because I have on previous cycles taken photographs of his newly constructed riverfront home and I felt he might enjoy seeing them. He, his wife and I chatted briefly.  Not surprisingly we have several acquaintances in common.

But the challenge at the end of the day has been to locate the missing blank cheque.  My neighbour stood sorrowfully at the front of the apartment building upon my return from cycling. He regreted to advise that a blank cheque and some associated folded papers disappeared from a back pocket upon his mission for delivery to the local hydro office. It is now late in the evening and he, his wife, my partner and I have revisited again and again all the circumstances surrounding the pocketing and disappearance of the papers.

I hold fast to the propositiion that the papers, if once put into a back pocket, would not somehow precipitously fall out.  Instead I am persuaded upon a balance of probabilities that the papers were for some reason removed and misplaced before the delivery mission began.  This in turn suggests the papers are still in the apartment.  Somewhere.  My neighbour assures me he has searched the apartment everywhere.

What further dissuades me from imagining that the papers somehow fell out of his back pocket is that it wasn’t until he had reached Mark’s Lookout on St. Paul Street along the Mississippi River that he, for whatever reason, noticed that the papers were missing. It occurs to me that if he were walking along Spring Street on a balmy summer afternoon he would have heard the sudden disappearance of papers from his pocket onto the ground.  But he did not.

Just because he cannot presently locate the papers in the apartment does not convince me they are not there.  It is not difficult to secrete folded papers in an unlikely venue such as the side of a table pushed against a wall. Of course this is all mere conjecture but I await further intelligence before abandoning the case.  Hercule Poirot is yet at work!