pleasure and colour

These fall days - with sun and wind and whirling orange, red, and yellow leaves showering down - are the best of the year. This must be why older people are the happiest: because we know to appreciate every bit of what we're soon going to lose. There is nothing as welcome and beautiful as a sunny Canadian autumn day. A red maple leaf is our flag for a reason.

The electricians have finished part of the job, after digging a trench across my ceiling and decimating the room.

But now there's light, including a vital motion sensor light above the little deck outside the door. When this room was my bedroom, a man jumped up there once in the middle of the night and terrified me, though my screams also terrified him and he jumped down and ran away. Now the light will make me feel safe. The other part of the job, decimating part of the kitchen, remains to be done at some later date. Hooray.

A stellar class today at U of T - such good good stories! - and a CNFC board meeting via the miracle of Zoom. Now I'm cutting 400 or 500 words out of an already short piece to send it somewhere. Hope springs etc.

Wanted to share something with you, something I mentioned a few weeks ago, a miraculous discovery at this late stage of life. And that something is Adams 100% Natural Peanut Butter. Adams is an American company, I just Googled, founded in 1922. You all know my addictions include red wine, dark chocolate, anything printed on paper, and the Internet. And now - Adams Peanut Butter. I eat it by the tablespoonful. It's got no preservatives or sugar but a tiny bit of salt makes all the difference. As someone who hated all food until the age of 18 and survived on this stuff, the discovery of a fabulous new peanut butter is something of a miracle.

It's Diwali, and my daughter celebrated with the entire South Asian community of her sons' school, which is a lot of saris. Nooo, I want to say. Don't hold this fabulous festival of colour now, when we're buried in colour. Defer it to February, when we'll really need to see something warm and bright!