Paul, my father, liked to build furniture from cedar; mostly from Western red cedar driftwood he collected on the beaches of Vancouver Island. He built a chest out of cedar. Like most of the stuff  he built, the chest has no right angles. It’s made from hand-hewn slabs of cedar knit together with pegs. A single hinge runs along the entire back of the lid. Twisted driftwood makes up the handles. He put casters under the chest, and used to roll the chest back and forth from under his tall bed, in the strange little shack on a farm in eastern Ontario where he spent his summers in the last decade of his life.

Chests, as an archetype, hold the promise of riches. Pirates bury treasure in chests. A chest, by its very nature, keeps stuff safe. A chest’s owner might lift the chest onto a stagecoach, or a galleon; therefore, the chest must be durable.

My father was in many senses a nomad – often on the road, and owning nothing that anyone would call a house. Yet he built a chest that does not travel well. My father died in the summer of 2018. After my father’s memorial, in October, I put the chest, heavily loaded, in my car, took it to my farm and put it in the barn. The sides came apart a bit during the chest’s travels.

Years ago in the National Post I wrote a series about my childhood. My father helped me with the research. He produced photocopies of dozens of letters both by him and to him, during the period he spent in prison in California, in 1969, 1970 and 1971.

When my father died about two years ago, my siblings agreed that I could have a chest full of his papers. Paul, the chest revealed, kept hundreds of letters and drawings from his children. He also preserved a remarkable trove of letters written by himself, which the recipients apparently gave back to him over the years.

In A Moveable Feast, Ernest Hemingway’s memoir of his early days as a writer in Paris, Hemingway recounts how he acted as a consultant for his fellow author, Scott Fitzgerald. In the chapter, “A Matter of Measurements,” Fitzgerald worries about the size of his equipment: “Zelda said that the way I was built I could never make any woman happy.”

I felt a bit like Fitzgerald the other day. Our dog and I went into the forest at our property in Madoc with my bow saw, to cut down a cedar pole for a new clothesline. I selected the largest tree that I could carry out of the woods on my shoulder. I felled the tree, lopped its branches, and brought it home. I dug a hole, put the pole in the hole and affixed bracing to place the pole straight before pouring cement.

The other day I went for a bicycle ride to the epicentre of Toronto’s financial district. I wanted to experience that particular spot, about a month into strict government pronouncements asking people to maintain social distance to defeat the novel coronavirus.

It’s a great time to ride a bike downtown: the streets are deserted. It’s pretty incredible to see what a virus can do the pulsing heart of Canadian capitalism. There is absolutely nobody around. The streetcars are vacant. The taxicab stands, normally clogged with cabbies looking for fares, are empty.

I went to First Canadian Place, the home of the Toronto Stock Exchange. At first I thought the security guard at the big white marble front desk would stop me, but he didn’t look up. I stood there, on a Monday at lunch hour: the sole human in the vast lobby with 10-metre ceilings. The Bank of Montreal bank machines stood glowing against a wall, but had no customers.

Odd detail about this pandemic: Most of the economy is shut down. My office is closed. I have to work from home. At the hardware store yellow caution tape prevents customers from browsing. Yet despite all these restrictions, apparently Toronto needs an unincumbered and continuous flow of cement.

This came to my attention on Friday when I went to drop off our car for an oil change in the east end. I sailed through empty streets, passing shuttered shops and schools and deserted playgrounds. At the garage, all the doors were locked. A mailbox contained envelopes. A sign asked motorists to fill in their name, phone number, the car’s odometre reading, and check off the service required. I left the key in the envelope and slipped it all through a slot.

I woke up in a grouchy mood. Can’t leave town because of coronavirus, can’t see friends, newspaper full of bad news about the stock market, the spreading disease, the more than 100 deaths overnight across the country. My sweetie asked me at breakfast to list three things I was grateful for; I growled before I answered.

Then the dog and I went out for a run. We waved to the letter carrier. Morning sun glittered in the crystalline, still, clear sky. The blue air tasted clear as the Arctic circle. No planes buzzed. The roads are empty; it is rarely worth it to wait for a light to change. My spirits quickly brightened. We ran east into the morning sun and then down through Trinity Bellwoods Park. We waved to couples and their dogs.

Running towards home, we bumped into a young woman we know because her dog, Zeus, was for a long time a friend to our dog. Zeus died a couple of years ago. We have remained friends, though we now rarely cross paths. She is a tall woman with long black hair, and wore an a stylish black wool coat on this chilly spring morning. She works as a property manager at CityPlace near the CN Tower, and said she was walking in to work.

At about 3 p.m. on Friday, March 21, 2020, a sunny afternoon in our sugar bush in Madoc, Ontario, with the temperature hovering at about -3C (and well over 100 C in the evaporator pan) I put in the call for help.

For the past few years I have boiled my sap in a pan about the size of a stovetop and as deep as a sink, placed on a couple of iron bars over the u-shaped ruins of an old syrup-making installation in the bush. The technique involves a certain amount of risk. I fill the pan with sap and make a fire under it. I boil it down a lot, then add more sap, pack the fire with as many logs as will fit, and go to bed. In the morning I find a layer of golden sap concentrate, cold and thus easy to handle. I can then leisurely transfer this concentrate to a smaller pot and complete the boiling to syrup, on my camp stove or barbecue.