Nice Day

Today promises to be an exceptionally beautiful day! It is now 6:00 a.m., and I have flung open a window in my study to admit the fresh morning air. The sky in the east beyond is a lapis blue, and the sun is already on the horizon, seeping its pink light into the Heavens. The streets are dry, though I doubt for long, as the temperatures rise and the roadside snow banks begin to melt. This of course is an important consideration for those of us who prize a clean automobile, at best a fleeting novelty in a Canadian winter. How I envy the Floridians their dry roads!


Already the first week of March is nearing an end, having begun appropriately on Monday last. I had a successful week at the office, not overly busy though steady. There were the usual challenges with bureaucracies, but thankfully surmounted. People were on the street a great deal, in view of the pleasant weather. I walked to work everyday except yesterday, when I needed the car to run some errands. The one-way jaunt consumes about twenty minutes, including those inescapable conversational detours peculiar to a small town.

Our weekend agenda conspires to be but a normal one of grocery shopping, picking up a movie ("Death in Venice") which we ordered months ago, and delivering a framed photograph (taken by my niece of her horse, Brell) to my parents. The only singularity of events will be a barbecue on Sunday afternoon at my sister's home off the Driveway. It will be the first barbecue of the season, a mixed grill so she informs us.

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This afternoon, however, proved to be unique on two counts. After a robust lunch of a dozen fresh Malpeque oysters on the half-shell and a large salad Nicoise with seared tuna slices washed down with a Guinness stout, I found myself sailing along the Appleton Side Road on my trusty Electra balloon tyred bicycle. First time this year! The shoulders of the road (which I took when facing on-coming traffic) were fairly firm, considering that the frost has likely not completely come out of the ground. On my way back from the Women's Institute in Appleton Village, I passed another cyclist on one of those flat elongated contraptions which to my thinking makes the pilot look decidedly preposterous, not to mention precarious. Afterwards, we prolonged ourselves on the back deck of the house, where the summertime furniture is now displayed (though as yet sans umbrella), soaking in the warm afternoon sunshine. The entire experience was somewhat bizarre as we were surrounded by fields of white snow. Because the air is so dry (nothing more than a faint wisp of a cloud in the northern sky), the snow didn't melt - it evaporated, leaving nothing but the crumbling remains of an icy skeleton of what had been there before.

For the time being our otherwise austere environment has been suddenly put on hold, though no one imagines I am sure that we're completely out of the woods at this early date in March. March has been known to have its winter storms. Nonetheless we seem to have awakened from our hibernation with the same startling abruptness as from a bad dream, and all the past weeks of burdensome weather are an equally distant and forgettable recollection. It won't be long before the noise of snowmobiles is replaced with that of lawnmowers!

I noticed too at the end of the day, pushing close to seven o'clock as I put down Jane Austen and arose from my green leather chair to recharge my martini glass, that there was yet light in the western sky. The morrow promises to be more of the same!