Yes, of course we agonize like this every spring, wondering when winter will ever leave, and why spring is so tardily ambivalent. Glimpses of the past that our memory willingly serves up if we really press the matter recall other spring-time arrivals when felt equally hard-put-upon by a cranky spent winter refusing to recognize its best-before date, and a timid spring that can't recall when its arrival date was meant to be.

Surely, we convince ourselves, this year is much, much worse, and it seems as though the cold will never relent, the snow will ever melt, and as we concern ourselves over the welfare of returning birds and the lack of accessibility to green shoots, insects and anything else that migrants will look for to sustain themselves, exhausted after their long flights, nature seems unperturbed.

Our ravine walk this early afternoon took us to the alternate portion of the Bilberry Creek ravine, necessitating that we cross des Epinettes, introducing Jack and Jill once again to whizzing traffic and the need to spring across the road to access half of the walk. On that side of the ravine the creek is almost in full thaw mode and roars downhill to make its way underground to the upper half. There is ample snow left, but it has a nasty dark crust atop it as it transforms into an unpleasant sight bearing little resemblance to the pristine blanket it once represented.

Although the morning dawned with heavy, dark clouds and light flurries after a night of rainfall and temperatures just hovering above freezing, the sun finally made its presence, warming the day to a tolerable 9 degrees making it possible for us to shed our winter jackets, but not, unfortunately, the boots and the cleats strapped over them to enable us to climb up and down icy trails.

The trails alternate between packed snow, degrading ice, and the bare forest floor turned into muck, and in some places pools of meltwater swimming with last year's foliage. Not entirely pleasant, but a fair facsimile of an energetic and appealing walk regardless.