This morning when I stepped outside with, or actually behind my walker I found a refreshingly soft rain, making me grateful. The rain is badly needed to help stop the wild fires ravishing our province, and … it felt so good soaking up the oxygen by the bucket full.

My walk made me think about the time when I was about five and walked with my father.

It was right in the middle of the hungry thirties and my father, who was a ground worker, was unemployed as were 30% of his partners in distress.

Together with his brother who was also without work, my father and I walked from one end of the village to the other - and back again – and again, being out of the way of mother for a while.

My father sucked now and than on an empty tobacco pipe, and uncle John did the same, talking while they walked about politics, the last Sunday sermon by the minister, the weather, the new crop of potatoes and sugar beets, and about hings I should not have heard. Not at that age anyways.

It was an uncertain and frightening time, with a somber and fearful future as another war was looming, but here we were, still walking in freedom, soaking up the fresh country air brimming with oxygen, just for the take.

I had my little hand in my father's big hand and I felt safe.

Just inside the bistro I was told that I was famous because I was published!, an overwhelming thing but also somewhat scary. How should I react to that, now that I was published, without making a fool of myself by bragging abut it.

Then I read an article by a staff member that gripped me about God's faithfulness to fathers.

She touched on a very familiar song, which we regularly sang in church before the modern trends sneaked in, admitting though that some of the 'new songs' nearly equal the proven old.

Great is Thy faithfulness, o God my Father
There is no shadow of turning with Thee
Thou changest not, Thy compassion's they fail not.
Great is Thy faithfulness, o God my Father
Morning by morning new mercies I see
All I have needed Thy hand hath provided.
Great is thy faithfulness, Lord unto me.

Last year the same writer wrote a story about her own father which touched me as deeply as her present article did.

Everyone was normal, which means that the atmosphere in this place, my home, is loving kindness, without the sweetness going with that word sometimes.

I made the right decision to make this place my home and my 'success' has a lot to do with the help from the staff members, when I was ready to throw in the towel, make that the computer, it was one staff member preventing that from happening and gave me a kick in the pants to boot, propelling me onward.

I got complimented about my published work by the CEO, who informed her friend in in the city where I first set my foot on Canadian soil sixty-three years ago, in Halifax.

We enjoy the best of food there is, still the cook gave me a local address of fish and chips because she knows I love fish and chips and maybe I can persuade my daughter Janice, to take us there because I have an appointment with the doctor and she drives me there.

Anyways, I am just in time to join the 'Armchair travel presentation' where we, after Belgium, Hungary, Hawaii, and many other countries of the world, visit today our own, Canada.

We will have coffee and cookies in the form of a maple leaf, with maple syrup filling, and before that we sing the stirring Canadian anthem – all four verses. O,yes we surely belong!

This is the second of 'letters to my friends' and to all of you kind people, thank you,

until we meet again!