It's very satisfying in a sense when you feel time is your own and you are free to apportion it as you will. Our early-morning split-second-decision to go directly out for our daily ramble through the forest with Jackie and Jillie, a case in point. There wasn't much cool air flashing through our bedroom window last night. So the floor fan came in handy to move air about. So much for air conditioning in a two-story house. 

We knew we'd be flirting once again with the possibility of rain, more like pop-up showers, but there are some mornings when it's just sensible to start the day this way. Jackie and Jillie sense the vibrations of expectation and run about excitedly. They sit obligingly for their collars and halters. We linger for the briefest of times in the garden, then turn to the street.

 

 

It's a still morning. The sun is absent, but it will return. The clouds keep shifting; although there is little wind down below, it's obviously busy up there. As we leave, a large densely dark cloud hovers overhead. Taking a chance these mornings has become routine. The forest canopy dense enough to shield us from light rain events.

 

 

We realize there must have been rain in the early morning hours from the appearance of the forest floor. the forest glows a bright, intense green all around us, even though there are cracks on the forest floor,  hungry for more rain on these hot and mostly sunny days. There is no one else about on the trails. We hear a woodpecker nearby, and further off a cardinal singing.

As we pass the creek, Irving stops briefly on the bridge to look down and sees a few water striders, and not much else. Later, when we're rounding out our circuit and take the narrow pathway overgrown with sawgrass that edges the bank of the creek we peer down and see a large orange goldfish. We know there are many more that we cannot see, smaller orange fish, but hundreds of tiny black hatchlings.

 

Irving points out to me growing at the side of the path, ragweed, already in flower. Too soon, they're usually later in the season. Everything seems to have accelerated this summer. Asters are also blooming and they shouldn't be, yet. We haul ourselves uphill to the upper level of the forest, cross another bridge and keep climbing to reach the top of the ravine's plateau.

 

It's our usual circuit, and not so long ago at this time of morning, there would be quite a few other larger-community residents accessing the ravine through a series of street-level entry points. For the last week or so that has changed, and we've come across fewer hikers every day. There are no mosquitoes unless you make yourself available to them by penetrating the forest interior, brushing up against lower-story shrubs or wildflowers.

 

 

The wildflowers have attained an astonishing height this year. Queen Anne's lace and pilotweed tower over us in their maturity. Today for a change we saw a lot of bees out gathering pollen, but they perch so fleetingly it's hard to capture them in a photo. We decide to go down to the pollinating meadow to finish off our circuit this morning. Usually Jackie and Jillie precede us on the trails. When we make our way through the narrow passage to the meadow it is so thickly grown in that they sensibly allow us to forge ahead and they follow.

 

 

We pass thick colonies of fleabane, Queen Anne's lace, and wild parsnip. And then we see a large mullein, beginning to flower. There aren't many of them in the forest. As we leave that narrow path thick with sawgrass we finally access the meadow, and there Irving begins to pick wild raspberries and ripe thimbleberries for Jackie and Jillie. 

 

But we aren't through forging through thick forest bracken, deciding to make our way to the opposite bank of the creek to see if we can spot any more of the fish. It's even more densely overgrown than the pathway. But there we see goldenrod beginning to flower, and purple loosestrife flowering, and the beautiful patches of black-eyed Susans, spectacular in their size, double petals and bright colour.

If there's a better, more exhilarating way to start a summer day, it hasn't yet occurred to us.