It's a prolonged clamber from winter into spring, and this March has been no exception to the usual agonizing wait for spring to truly arrive. The weather keeps zinging back and forth from relatively mild to nastily cold, spurred on by the ever-present wind and occasional snow events. Even so, the snow has been responding to the increasing warmth of the spring sun's rays, and our area snowpack is slowly diminishing. We won't be sorry to see the end of it, even though the process will leave us mired in muck for awhile.

Work crews will be expected to return to Bilberry Creek Ravine to remediate the condition of the trials, left as they were in construction-mode, rutted deeply and the clay exposed where rough-cut and too-large granite chunks with no resemblance to gravel littered along most of the trails, were left behind through the process of earth movers and tracked construction shovels moving dirt, clay and detritus from the new bridge sites to removal depots.

But for the time being, and briefly, the trails remain fully packed with snow gradually turning to ice. Without cleats pulled over snowboots traversing the trails would be a challenge, far more so than they present to us fully geared. And the environment still looks beautiful with its snow blanket, not yet the drear visage of desiccated foliage littering the forest floor and bare branches of trees beseeching running sap to help the sun nurture the formation of new green foliage.

When we returned from our ravine walk yesterday, exhausted but content with the improving performance of Jack and Jill in their jaunts with us, my husband took time out to gather some newspapers out of the recycling box to remove a plaintive reminder that nature, beyond its attraction for us of the beautiful transformations we so admire, also calls its creatures to finalize their lifespans for a multitude of reasons. Our street is a very traffic-quiet one, with mostly the residents driving down it, and mostly because they are residents, driving slowly, carefully. Concern for the welfare of small children and companion pets are a priority.

But some vehicle, we surmise, must have hit a plump little grey squirrel that might have been at our squirrel feeders. We could not avoid seeing its sad little corpse lying on the road in front of a neighbour's house. It was still there awhile later, someone having moved it to the snowmound in front of that neighbour's front lawn. The newspapers were to wrap it with, so it could be laid to rest in a trench left by the melting snow pack, around a large old spruce off the beaten path in the ravine. After my husband laid it there, as its final resting place, he covered it with snow.

Nature in her great wisdom will see to the rest.