But Not Without Pleasure
Not a very good start to the day, getting up late, even if it's a Saturday morning. We've gotten lazy. The weather helps, there. No early morning light to bring our bedroom alive, just a dim overcast, and the knowledge that it's pouring out there. Has been, since the evening before. Went on all night, relentlessly, and continued well on into the morning. It's lazy-making weather, that's what it is. Aside from the fact that both of us are still clambering out of assaults on our health and physical well-being.
My husband is on medication to quell the riot in his gastrointestinal tract, and although my bout with Shingles is well behind me now, the medication protocol long ceased and my gradual return to normalcy well on its way, there manifests, still, extremely uncomfortable reminders. My husband's medication has had certain side-effects, one of which was a relatively brief bout with diarrhoea, the other extreme drowsiness. His lack of energy, for a man who has always had a superabundance of same, is another thing altogether.
We have heard nothing yet from our family doctor with respect to the results of the tests he took a week earlier. But he does feel infinitely better than he had. His ultra sound appointment is still three weeks' distant, and who knows when his appointment with a heart specialist will take place, since there doesn't appear to be any reason to believe there is a problem there. Just that our doctor said that at three-score-years-and-ten that kind of check-up would represent sound medical practise.
After breakfast we decided to venture out into the ravine with our little companions. All of us clad for the weather, since it was still raining, but more of a slight drizzle, by then. One of our neighbours was hauling out upholstered furniture to the end of his driveway; he thought, he said, that this was 'free give-away' week-end. It was not. We suggested, in passing, that he might want to call the Salvation Army, since they'll pick up furniture that can be re-used. By the time we returned from our walk the upholstered chairs had been returned to his garage.
As we descended into the ravine, we still had a modicum of shelter from the rain, because of the leaves still remaining on the trees, offering a frail but still appreciated, canopy. Of course, that was counter-acted by the effect of thoroughly-drenched leafage shedding their excess of moisture at each bit of encouragement by the prevailing, but light winds. Since we weren't planning to do our usual lengthy passage through the ravine in the rain, I left double the peanuts I usually do at the usual places, and we had the pleasure of witnessing squirrels making straightway for them.
Even with the dull overcast, there is a riot of colour in the ravine. Overhead, the maples - mostly bright yellow, with some trees bearing scarlet leaves - are still mostly full of their leaves. As are the beech, with their orange-brown-yellow leaves. Nor have the oak even begun to turn colour yet; their leaves are bright, bright green. The birch trees, white and yellow, have long since lost their leaves, and the poplars are steadily losing theirs. The poplar leaves yellow, with a peculiar slight green stripe down them, maintain their colour for a day on the ground, then swiftly turn grey-black and ugly.
Later, we dressed ourselves differently and drove to the other end of the city, to Carleton University's capacious Fieldhouse, for the semi-annual antique show and sale which this year had been advertised as a fun appeal for fashion-adventurous young women, with vintage jewellery and vintage clothing in the offing. We might have missed the show, in the belief that this wasn't the usual attraction that would bring us out, but rather another, entirely different show. The advertising, it would appear, even confused the vendors who themselves had to make enquiries to ascertain that yes, this was their show.
We bundled Button and Riley into their respective carry-bags, slung them over our shoulders, and trudged from the parking lot, in light rain, into the Fieldhouse, and began to browse about among the various stalls. Looking for those items that would have special appeal to us. Congratulating ourselves for having first toughed the rain and gotten our little dogs out to exercise prior to this exercise. They don't mind being hauled about; they settle down comfortably into their bags and begin to snooze, hardly seeming aware of where we happen to be.
For our part, we enjoyed perusing the wares, though we strode fairly briskly through the aisles until reaching those stalls where paintings were highlighted, and porcelains, and clocks, and other period objets d'art, which tend to attract our curiosity. We admire the furniture, the Canadian pine furniture and the Continental furniture, and above all, the furniture that speaks of age and hand-crafting, superior design and workmanship. But we're not in the market for furniture; we've acquired more than enough over the decades of collecting.
Paintings, though, that's another genre of aesthetic appreciation altogether, for us. In a way our first mutual attraction. When our three children were still infants we blew a monthly child-supplement cheque from the government on acquiring a century-old British interior scene of the courtship of a young woman by an elderly suitor, her family seated around a farmhouse table, the tableau redolent of days gone by and the sadness of material poverty, the difficulties inherent in the-then social contract.
Today, we found a middling-size landscape, a Marmaduke Matthews watercolour of a waterfall in the mountains of British Columbia during the days of railroad building out West. And although he was a coeval of some very pricey artists of the period, his paintings are not priced beyond our ability to pay. There were also two other watercolours; 19th Century British paintings; one off the coast of Italy, the other of Old Cairo, the Kasbah. Each of them an exquisite masterwork of detail beautifully etched for posterity of a time long gone by in the world's rush to modernity.
Then home, to rest and relax, read the newspapers. First, I made a bread dough for the pizza we will together make for our evening meal, indulging ourselves right handsomely to make the most of this overcast, dull, fall day.
My husband is on medication to quell the riot in his gastrointestinal tract, and although my bout with Shingles is well behind me now, the medication protocol long ceased and my gradual return to normalcy well on its way, there manifests, still, extremely uncomfortable reminders. My husband's medication has had certain side-effects, one of which was a relatively brief bout with diarrhoea, the other extreme drowsiness. His lack of energy, for a man who has always had a superabundance of same, is another thing altogether.
We have heard nothing yet from our family doctor with respect to the results of the tests he took a week earlier. But he does feel infinitely better than he had. His ultra sound appointment is still three weeks' distant, and who knows when his appointment with a heart specialist will take place, since there doesn't appear to be any reason to believe there is a problem there. Just that our doctor said that at three-score-years-and-ten that kind of check-up would represent sound medical practise.
After breakfast we decided to venture out into the ravine with our little companions. All of us clad for the weather, since it was still raining, but more of a slight drizzle, by then. One of our neighbours was hauling out upholstered furniture to the end of his driveway; he thought, he said, that this was 'free give-away' week-end. It was not. We suggested, in passing, that he might want to call the Salvation Army, since they'll pick up furniture that can be re-used. By the time we returned from our walk the upholstered chairs had been returned to his garage.
As we descended into the ravine, we still had a modicum of shelter from the rain, because of the leaves still remaining on the trees, offering a frail but still appreciated, canopy. Of course, that was counter-acted by the effect of thoroughly-drenched leafage shedding their excess of moisture at each bit of encouragement by the prevailing, but light winds. Since we weren't planning to do our usual lengthy passage through the ravine in the rain, I left double the peanuts I usually do at the usual places, and we had the pleasure of witnessing squirrels making straightway for them.
Even with the dull overcast, there is a riot of colour in the ravine. Overhead, the maples - mostly bright yellow, with some trees bearing scarlet leaves - are still mostly full of their leaves. As are the beech, with their orange-brown-yellow leaves. Nor have the oak even begun to turn colour yet; their leaves are bright, bright green. The birch trees, white and yellow, have long since lost their leaves, and the poplars are steadily losing theirs. The poplar leaves yellow, with a peculiar slight green stripe down them, maintain their colour for a day on the ground, then swiftly turn grey-black and ugly.
Later, we dressed ourselves differently and drove to the other end of the city, to Carleton University's capacious Fieldhouse, for the semi-annual antique show and sale which this year had been advertised as a fun appeal for fashion-adventurous young women, with vintage jewellery and vintage clothing in the offing. We might have missed the show, in the belief that this wasn't the usual attraction that would bring us out, but rather another, entirely different show. The advertising, it would appear, even confused the vendors who themselves had to make enquiries to ascertain that yes, this was their show.
We bundled Button and Riley into their respective carry-bags, slung them over our shoulders, and trudged from the parking lot, in light rain, into the Fieldhouse, and began to browse about among the various stalls. Looking for those items that would have special appeal to us. Congratulating ourselves for having first toughed the rain and gotten our little dogs out to exercise prior to this exercise. They don't mind being hauled about; they settle down comfortably into their bags and begin to snooze, hardly seeming aware of where we happen to be.
For our part, we enjoyed perusing the wares, though we strode fairly briskly through the aisles until reaching those stalls where paintings were highlighted, and porcelains, and clocks, and other period objets d'art, which tend to attract our curiosity. We admire the furniture, the Canadian pine furniture and the Continental furniture, and above all, the furniture that speaks of age and hand-crafting, superior design and workmanship. But we're not in the market for furniture; we've acquired more than enough over the decades of collecting.
Paintings, though, that's another genre of aesthetic appreciation altogether, for us. In a way our first mutual attraction. When our three children were still infants we blew a monthly child-supplement cheque from the government on acquiring a century-old British interior scene of the courtship of a young woman by an elderly suitor, her family seated around a farmhouse table, the tableau redolent of days gone by and the sadness of material poverty, the difficulties inherent in the-then social contract.
Today, we found a middling-size landscape, a Marmaduke Matthews watercolour of a waterfall in the mountains of British Columbia during the days of railroad building out West. And although he was a coeval of some very pricey artists of the period, his paintings are not priced beyond our ability to pay. There were also two other watercolours; 19th Century British paintings; one off the coast of Italy, the other of Old Cairo, the Kasbah. Each of them an exquisite masterwork of detail beautifully etched for posterity of a time long gone by in the world's rush to modernity.
Then home, to rest and relax, read the newspapers. First, I made a bread dough for the pizza we will together make for our evening meal, indulging ourselves right handsomely to make the most of this overcast, dull, fall day.
Labels: Perambulations
posted by Pieface @ 1:32 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home