When we first began our circuits in the forested ravine off the street where our house sits, the top portion of the ravine represented a fairly open field filled with small shrubs and wildflowers in season, with a few tall pines, before dipping back down into the ravine proper with its heavily forested areas. Now that once-open space is densely covered with trees. The elms have since succumbed to Dutch elm disease, never having grown beyond a decade's-worth of maturity.

But the pines and the spruce, the maples and the poplars have absolutely thrived, providing a very respectable ground cover and a nice canopy for protection from sun and rain. Lately, the ash trees have fallen victim to the more recent invasion of Ash tree borers and they are in sad decline. But there are a few wild apple trees and they have produced munificently this year.

Yesterday my husband picked one promising apple up from among the litter of those that had fallen beside the trail, polished it nicely on his shirt and presented it to me. It was crisp, sweet and juicy, surely the best apple I'd tasted this year, although I am not normally given to eating apples, strangely enough.

And this morning, my husband hauled upstairs for me the basket of large McIntosh apples our daughter had brought over as a gift, harvested from the larger of the two apple trees that sit beside her house. This evening, we will enjoy an apple pie; we do eat apples in that form, a favourite of my husband's.