Month: August 2020

It’s the late afternoon here in this small town on the Canadian prairies. It is sunny and relatively warm. I woke up to a temperature of +2 degrees Celsius. The garden tells me that there was a faint touch of frost on some of the leaves. I guess I could say that summer is officially over and that autumn has made an entrance. The strong winds of the past few days is appreciated by the farmers trying to harvest their crops which appear to be abundant and of high quality, bumper crops in their terms. We went for our usual 5.5 km walk when pressed for time this morning. Because of the wind and the single digit temperatures, we wore three layers. It is going to take some time to acclimatize the weather shift.

By the time we got back from our walk, the temperature reached double digits. I went to work taking corn off the cob so that my wife could can it in pint jars for the winter. This will be the first winter in our home since the winter of 2006-7. From our vantage point, we assume that we will be home bound for the next two winters waiting for the new normal to hopefully settle. Because of this intention, we are ensuring that we can and freeze garden produce, including produce we get from local Hutterian gardens. At least we will eat well.

The corona virus pandemic is forcing a lot of changes on all of us. Some of those changes are good, and some are not so good. For naturists, it has meant a more solitary existence. Home naturist is likely the norm for most. Non-naturists are also taking advantage of social distancing and working at home to forego the need to wear clothing. I haven’t gone to my home naturist club this year despite paying my annual fees. I just didn’t want to risk meeting up with old friends who may or may not be carriers. After all, at our age, we are most at risk. It is enough to have my safe and sacred space called my home and yard.

Because of the pandemic, I have done a lot of improvements, including a privacy fence that has long been needed. As a result, my non-naturist wife is less nervous when I am in the yard while nude, which is most of the time when our neighbours aren’t present. Another project is going to happen relatively soon. We are changing out the wood fireplace for a gas fireplace. I am allergic to wood smoke so we haven’t used the fireplace. Now that we’ll be home for the full winter, a fireplace will be a welcome feature. Once that project is finalised, I will likely post a photo.

The pandemic is impacting all of us, psychologically. I shut down my previous site because of a depression that COVID-19 exacerbated. I retreated just like I retreated from contact in the outer world with social distancing. Now, as I have achieved more balance, I find myself ready to be willing to risk being vulnerable and exposed.

How are you responding to the changes in yourself in relation to people face-to-face and online? I am listening and I care about what you will have to say.

Yesterday, we celebrated forty-nine years of marriage. As is normal for us, a walk in the countryside was included as part of our anniversary celebrations. We drove to one of our starting points near the hills to the south of our prairie town home, about seven kilometres. After parking the truck in a field that had been combined. I set my Garmin watch to record our hiking trail and other interesting stats. We followed the dirt road for 2.5 kilometres to the end of the road. Once through a gate, I removed my shorts and we continued on to walk up and down the hills and ravines which were removed from the busy countryside where harvesting was in progress.

My wife took this photo, as well as a few others while we were trekking through the hills and valleys. Though the photo was blurred, I decided that it was perfect, especially for this blog post. It’s the idea that the image projects more than the recording of an event. There is no doubt that the scene was natural rather than contrived. This was a thin wildlife trail through shrub where I was likely to get scratched by various bushes and thorny weeds if I wasn’t careful. It definitely couldn’t be a “selfie” moment. My wife simply took the opportunity to capture this image with her cellphone.

Five and a half kilometres later, we had returned to the beginning of the dirt road trail where the shorts were put back on and we retraced our steps to the truck. My Garmin watch recorded our hike. The straight line represents the part walked while I wore shorts. The circle at the bottom was my place and time for free-hiking. Just a side note, combining wheat was in progress in the field just to the right of where I had parked my truck. Soon, there will be no people to be seen in the area once the last of the crops are taken down and I will have all of this to myself meaning a longer distance to free-hike.

It was time to head home for a refreshing “cerveza con limon” on our deck in the back yard before our late lunch. Our backyard is my sanctuary where clothing is mostly optional. When we don’t have company and the weather is decent, I don’t wear clothing. This has become normal life now that the privacy fence has been constructed.

Well, it has been some time, and I am not too sure that this is going to survive. After all, none of the past blog sites have managed to survive. That said, I have managed to find a few old export files from last year that serve as a historical reminder of that blogging past. I am re-approaching the idea of blogging because I am a writer and a blogger. I began my first blog site in 2006, a travel blog site because I had taken a job in China as a university instructor, teaching education classes to students who were learning to be second-language teachers in China. With my background as both a second-language teacher and administrator in charge of teachers and teachers-in-training, it seemed to be the natural lateral move once I had retired from educational administration in my home province in Canada. That first blog posting site was mostly about showing images of China and my life there with my wife.

I began my first WordPress site in late 2008. Again, it was about photography to begin with and then it morphed into a psychology blog site at the beginning of the New Year in Mexico, 2009. Occasionally, a post would be naturist in content. It wasn’t until the spring of 2013 before I began to have a blog site focused on naturism. Because of my own psychological journey as a naturist, the site was continually erased over the years. So it is with a tentative hope that I once again head down this trail as a blogger.