The temperature a week ago Monday was 26C. The next day, it was 6C and the day after, the overnight temperature plunged to -5C.

The evening before the killer frost and knowing it was imminent I spent some quiet moments with my garden. The vines in particular seemed anxious. I reassured the garden that everything would be OK: it would, come the spring, live again.

And so the annual process of raking up summer, putting it in bags and taking it to the city recycling depot (oh how I miss the now-heretical therapy of burning them on a foggy autumn day!) began.

More recycling took place on the weekend. As recently as two years ago Thanksgiving dinner was restricted to my mother, my wife, and I. Everyone else was gone. But this year, there we were—the three incumbents—with my son and his wife, my daughter and a young man who wished to make our acquaintance, another young man whom we had housed during his transition to Calgary and his girlfriend—nine of us, in all. But it wasn't the numbers I noticed so much as it was the composition of the table—two-thirds of which was under 30 and in the majority, I think, for the first time.

Normally prone to bloviation on these occasions, I determined to sip quietly on a measure of sturdy amber fluid of Highland origin in a crystal glass of Italian breeding, stroke my delicately manicured white goatee, and instead listen to what turned out to be a fascinating salon composed of a dancer, a dramaturgist, a theatre artist, a legal student, a lawyer, and a political communications specialist/religious scholar.

I struck me that their youth was magnified in contrast to the presence of the three old people who perhaps had more perspective to gain than wisdom to impart. And I was one of those old people. And then, before I got anxious, I remembered that spring will come again.