The world outside my windows is a winter wonderland, the kind of landscape that cries out for boots, warm hats, scarves and mittens and the exhilaration of a long walk in the snow. Now past is my favourite part of every year,  when all the  Christmas hubbub and heavy eating are over and there are still a few precious days  that can be devoted to doing exactly what one pleases before the routine of normal life begins anew. 

Today reality sets in. For me this entails some domestic paperwork and the resumption of the legal research that earns me my living. Now that the Land Registry System in the province exists to a large extent online, I am fortunate to be able to work at home,  from a jumbled desk in proximity to my own coffeepot. Unless I have to concentrate deeply, the CBC provides the soundtrack to my work. 

This morning too we drove into Bridgewater to the annual book sale at Sagor’s Bookstore which is, believe it or not, one of the reasons we moved to this area in the first place. Run for over twenty years by Ron Topp and Susan Goodwin, it is one of the South Shore’s greatest treasures, a surviving independent  book shop of incredible variety and relevance in the era of the big chain store. 

The store was full of customers, browsing and chatting and careening cheerfully toward the cash. Since we missed the beginning of the sale, having chosen to remain cocooned here on the farm, the choicest selections had largely been scooped up already by others, but I did come home with  “Cezanne’s Quarry,”  described on its cover as “an elegant murder mystery” based on the premise that the painter, Paul Cezanne, might have committed a murder. Because my purchase was based on a fondness for art historical content and not on any reviews, this may or may not have been a wise choice.

To complete the return to reality was also a reappearance at the gym. Although we live in a small rural hamlet we are fortunate to hold memberships in a state-of- the-art fitness facility in a village some eleven kilometres down the road. Donated by the late lumber magnate whose family mill is the locus of employment in the area, it is well used yet somehow almost always empty when we appear to sweat and moan. This gives the experience a certain luxury unheard of at other facilities in the town.

Now exhausted, with a hot cup of Earl Gray, I plan on cracking the covers of my new book.