Summer scenes

Looking out our picture windows on this lovely morning I saw among the exuberant green leaves of late summer the first orange and golden leaves of autumn, and realized that this summer is passing me by. This morning I decided not to allow it to pass entirely without some experience of it, so while Sharon Morrison, Wendy's personal care worker, was still here I went out for a walk along the path by the Canal. Much of Ottawa's population seemed to be doing the same, the path almost needed a traffic patrol; it would certainly have benefited from some method of separating speeding cyclists from mums and dads with babies in strollers, dawdling elderly folk like me, winter sports lovers with devices resembling skis with little wheels fore and aft, propelled by ski poles fitted with ends like midget toilet plungers, the occasional skate boarder (is skate-boarding waning? It seems so locally) and of course many, many people on roller blades,keeping their skills honed for the ice that they hope will cover the Canal in a few months from now. It required more sure-footed dexterity than I possess these days to avoid colliding with the wheeled varieties of outdoors-lovers on the wide and recently resurfaced pathway, so I retreated like many others to the grass beside the pond, where I had to watch my feet to avoid the large and rather sticky deposits left by the Canada geese that have adopted these lawns as their favourite pasture. This is the pond where carp and catfish spawn in springtime but all those large fish are now long gone, many of them down the gullets of Chinese fishermen for whom this pond is a favourite place in spring and early summer. Today the pond was chock-full, like the path alongside it, not with people but with adolescent ducks learning the up-tails-all skills of stripping the waterweed from the bottom. It's a better place to learn that skill than the canal or Patterson's inlet beside our condominium because the water is less than half a meter deep with a flat, sand or gravel bottom from which the waterweed is easily stripped. But it was hot already at 1030-1100 this morning, so I cut short my stroll in the fresh air and retreated to the air-conditioned comfort of our apartment. I hope I will have some opportunities to experience more of this splendid summer before it all ends.