During the winter of his years, he occasionally recalled that twelve-year-old boy who would, on lonely autumn weekends, walk on Dog Hill, wind gusts loosening the terminal leaves from the scattered trees that grew just below the ridge crest. A boy he hardly knew, indeed, perhaps never knew. Yet, on rare afternoons, there seemed to be little difference between that naïve lad and the white-bearded man walking the Wawanosh Wetlands. And while wetlands were not hills, and the passage of decades had changed much, this was also a Carolinian forest harbouring the same bird and animal species. Most importantly, November was still and always November, a period of pause prior to the final dying. Dog Hill had for many years been a sub-division of inexpensive houses. It had gradually become home to different dreams, to different imagined futures. But no matter, all the pages of the book of the future are blank, and have never been otherwise. In fact, it could be that there was no hill, no boy to ramble across it when the wind turned chill; maybe such a scene lived only in the memory of one old man, to eventually die with him. Could it ever be proven? But every year November is certain. Even today, skeletal goldenrods shake as winds sweep over the water, turning the slate sky more grey, the mind ever sharper.
