As I confessed to the giant and frightfully affable auburn-haired and bearded attendant with whom I spoke earlier today at the car wash (deservedly he’s being trained for management), routinely driving my XT4 and getting it washed (whether it needs it or not) is for me a thoroughly pleasing preoccupation, one which exceeds anything else I have to do. And by the same standard, it is a privilege which I believe merits accreditation. My lassitude is I reckon both a favourable and an unfavourable admission by varying accounts; but it is irreconcilably the truth, one for which frankly I am smugly content. Mechanical precision is of no small consequence to me; and, motoring combined with open windows on a sunny day is in my view beyond compare.

I have just this moment retired from our apartment balcony where for 30 minutes I prolonged myself on a deck chair, lazing in the late afternoon sunshine while overlooking the distant wavering fields and slipping in and out of blank reverie. Reminiscences of forgotten times bubbled to the fore nurtured by the sun’s warmth and its stock ineffable improvement. A cow mooed; birds tweeted; the wind rustled.

Today marked as well another superlative promenade on a breezy sunshiny day along the halcyon country road bordering the Mississippi River. I began my uneventful day with a 4km tricycle ride up and down Spring Street between the intersections of the roadways where we used to turn when we lived on the other side of the neighbourhood and the juncture where we now turn and reside, both within the expansive riparian property previously owned by the late Albert T. Gale (after whose daughter “Laura” the crescent on which we once lived was named).

We complimented the perfection of the day with an unanticipated “speaker” telephone call with my sister and brother-in-law who brought us abreast the latest urban gossip in their own neighbourhood. As longtime residents on the street where they live, their interest in developments (including the current sale of a beloved neighbour’s grand home) is perhaps more acute than normal. They have been witness to all the comings and goings for the past four decades. Such incomparable legitimacy is naturally impossible to exceed. And while they easily qualify for old fogey status, their authenticity is indisputable.They are the common denominators from which all transactions in the neighbourhood spring.

For our part – by contrast – we are only now fully awakening to the depth of the neighbourhood to which we have lately arrived. I recall very clearly from my youthful days of having shifted from prep school to undergraduate to graduate school (all in different cities and one in a different province), it requires a minimum of one year to adjust to a new environment to the point of relieving oneself of the wish to go back whence one came. Even though our latest residential platform is in the same town, the insular nature of even a rural community is so forceful that a similar adjustment is required as if one were moving to a new town. Happily I report that we are infinitely pleased with our new digs and neighbours. And did I mention the river…?