Autumn Visit

Finally a relaxation of the bitter cold, the incessant wind, the damp atmosphere, the sudden rainfalls. This day recalled the early days of fall, presenting us with a brief reprieve from the inexorable push toward winter. A lovely clear sky, with wisps of fragmented, airy clouds. Last night's temperature that had plunged to minus-8-degrees gained mightily by early afternoon, to plus-8. After our ravine walk, plodding through the muck of trails frozen overnight and released to mud by mid-morning, we set out for a family visit.

It's been entirely too long since we've been face-to-face with our granddaughter and her mother. Multiple-daily telephone conversations and emails somehow suffice, but don't quite make the grade. We require the warmth and contentment and reassurance of flesh-to-flesh contact. It's a lengthy road trip, made even more so by road work halting traffic for prolonged periods of time.

But eventually, we made it, rolled into the long driveway of our daughter's 1864 log schoolhouse, transformed over the years into a fair-sized house with its own attached summer cottage, all looking out over a sizeable wetland, beyond which lies her five acres of Canadian shield, with meadows and forest, and all the wildlife that can be seen of a day. Birds of every description, small furry creatures, and larger; deer too, at her apple trees.

Long gone now the songbirds and the hummingbirds, but bluejays, chickadees, and a varied succession of woodpeckers drop faithfully back to deplete her feeders. It's amazing how much a thirteen-year-old can change in the space of a few weeks. Her height, her contours, her attitude, all undergo profound alterations. She's accustomed to having her photographs taken by her grandmother, but of late shy of them.

"I hate photos of me!" she protests, as I counter-protest that I cannot possibly leave without a few photographs of our only grandchild. "All right. If you must, if you so insist", she gracelessly succumbs to my endearments and my coaxing, still refusing to pose. As though I want anything posed, in any event. And I am well satisfied with only a few photographs; they will do, very nicely, to fulfill my need.

We've unloaded all the items we brought along, and she proclaims herself to be willing enough to wear the new down-filled winter jacket, hooded, in bright white, to augment the one her mother has bought for this winter's wear. I prevaricated when she asked whether it had 'feathers' in it, since she always says down-filled jackets look 'fat'. And I assured her that the 'fur' trim was not genuine, but faux fur, so that too was all right.

Inside the front door, in the long, glassed-in foyer with all its warmth from the sun, some of the menagerie who inhabit the house alongside our daughter and granddaughter, are happily flaked out, absorbing the warm rays. The always-cold chihuahua cuddles with the obliging Australian shepherd who mothers it happily, licking its fur, and offering the smaller dog its own considerable body warmth.

When we depart to begin the return journey, it is late afternoon, the sun has been overtaken by a sky-full of conjoined and humped cloud formations, allowing the bright light of the soon-to-set sun to illuminate their whipped-cream formations. Farmed fields of corn, desiccated, not yet harvested, are a warm glowing gold, reflecting the sun. Silos glint silver in the sun. Plowed fields whose orderly rows are accentuated in gold hues, winter-prepared.

We see high overhead, one line after another of geese, heading out, off the cornfields and their day's languid rest on the Ottawa River. Not to be outdone, formless networks of crows lift off their tree-mast perches and flap the darkening sky. A red glow rests on shrubs and trees, naked of their leaves, but proud of this new flame that temporarily lights their presence.