Bacon Scrapins are the little bits of meat left in the greasy fry pan. They’re tasty, but the ‘nutrition’ needs searching for. This tale is a bacon scrapin.

I first met Mike and Erica forty-five years ago. They lived down the hall and around the corner from my future wife in a high-rise apartment in the city. We got married the next year. They moved to a double-drive-with-a-pool, side-split in the country. We moved into a bungalow, ‘sans garage’, on the edge of the city.

Mike and Erica raised their family in the country. My wife and I have moved five times since, each time to small rural towns. Both our families’ kids have grown, left, married and presented us with grandchildren. A year ago, Mike and Erica sold the bungalow with the pool and got a deal on a two-bedroom condo on the sixth floor in Belmont Village – “Right in the centre of it all!” as Mike says. We’re still in a bungalow in the countryside.

Mike’s something of a chef. He is a fan of the craft breweries and multi-cultured eateries in the city. Together, the four of us have enjoyed walking circuits of the Belmont Village area. It’s close to Grand River Hospital in an emergency, a short jaunt to Waterloo Park, and on a clear evening you can hear the live band music. You can also see the cranes and skeletons of ever taller high-rises going up, closer and closer to their balcony.

Mike ends his day looking out at the high-rises to south, east and west. He enjoys the clicking of the wheels on the rails as the diesel growls its way across the short bridge ¼ block away. He is lulled by the tires of cars constantly passing below him.

Me? There’s something special about sitting in my zero-gravity chair, brewski in hand, tracking a blinking plane light as it slowly passes across the line of the Dipper, imagining where we could be going. Nothing beats gently dozing off to the gentle breeze – carrying that slight hint of manure across my patio.