It's been a strange spring so far. The sumacs have their candles, and the dogwood are in bloom, with the largest, most sumptuous panicles we've ever seen. We've been inundated with heat waves, with hot, humid winds, and the trails have become quite boggy. There are large areas of temporary ponds in the woods because the ground can no longer absorb all this excess moisture.

Mosquito larvae undoubtedly infest those little ponds, to mature and join the flying hordes that love to prey on us. It was 32-degrees yesterday with a hot wind that offered no relief whatever, so I wore shorts and a brief top, though I also slathered insect repellant on my bare skin, something I rarely succumb to. The mosquitoes seemed to enjoy my tender flesh all the more, because of the repellant's presence.

We've seen a few interesting fungi growing on old wood, and they're colourfully attractive; organisms expected when it's so wet during the spring and fall.

And the poplars growing so plentifully in the wooded ravine, along with oak, willows, maple, ash, pine, spruce and so many other trees, have produced an excess of downy-white seeds, so plentiful that at times they fall as generously as thick snow, and pile up into seedbanks resembling snowbanks. No one can recall seeing so much of it in other years.

The trilliums, trout lilies and Jack-in-the-pulpits have come and gone in their flowering stages, along with red baneberry and lovely and rare sightings of blue-eyed grass, and now the buttercups are beginning to make their appearance.

During today's ravine walk squirrels finally made their appearance; not hordes, but enough to reassure us that they're still there, scrambling for peanuts. One particularly avaricious crow follows us avidly from the time we enter the ravine at the top of our street, virtually throughout the loop we generally take, until, one supposes, he is surfeit with peanuts.

Today, the kind of unusual occurrence one would prefer to be without; a blackfly flew directly into one of my eyes. I knew it was a blackfly because of how it felt; small and wet. And I was unable to dislodge it. My husband tried, lifting my eyelid and pulling it aside to reveal the creature, but to no avail. I felt its irritatingly stubborn presence in my eye for the entire circuit. When we arrived home, using a very wet washcloth I tried to wash it out of my eye.

Finally, my husband took charge as he usually does and managed to sweep it out of my eye. And we discovered, to our consternation that it was still alive and well, despite its trials, and mine. And it was indeed a blackfly. Doing the backstroke on the watery surface of my eye.