Overlooking the wintry white fields, their avenues of frozen yellow stalks and the ivory covered river, there is a winding track upon the face of the river as though a snowmobiler rode upon the ice and snow.  But the track is too elliptical, too perfect. It is too incomplete and thus impossible to reflect a passage other than what was probably no more than the superficial effect of an undercurrent of water following the submerged perimeter of the weeds and earthen shoreline below. It is a design of an artist’s hand upon the snowy canvass, a wisp of shadow within the white, a sudden apostrophe with an abrupt and inconsequential ending.

It is frigid today. Gossamer drifts of snow, roaming particles of white are borne across the Appleton Side Road by the northwesterly wind. It feels like -18°C. I am sporting a new silk scarf Made in China, a mixed colour of azure, emerald and black.  The material is so smooth that I am unable to restrain the security of the scarf about my neck. The silken scarf gradually dissolves from the slight open knot and regains its original unfettered and uncompressed dalliance.

Or perhaps it is only the limitation of time, that we haven’t enough of it to flavour our substantial ingredients with life’s immeasurable distillations or boiled reductions and refinements of all that has transpired in a moment or a day or a lifetime.

The sky reminds me now of a distant power, a shade of blue and grey with a trace of pink, a place by the sea where the vastness of the horizon and the sweeping sand obscures all detail, evaporating into abstract contemplation only, relieved of the monotony of obsession.

Meanwhile I am told that a father and his son have departed the roost in their own unrelated directions to secure their own knot about the urban landscape, affording their own expressions of thought and training, fulfilling their growth. Will they have an account, a scribbled note of recollection, a thread of memory to insinuate the whole? Or must we rely solely upon the elixir within our veins to disturb those erstwhile ambitions? Is the texture so soft that it retains nothing? A silent rain, a lenient compassion, a noticeable but unremarkable touch?