Ottawa has succeeded with July turning into August, in shedding the debilitating heat wave we've been exposed to the last week with its sky-high humidity levels. We hear from the news that people living in Basra, southern Iraq, a city whose municipal infrastructure had been pretty well destroyed in the U.S.-led bombing to remove Saddam Hussein, are truly suffering with a heat wave that has brought them successive 50-degree days of misery. As it is they enjoy no more than several hours of electricity each day.

But that's the Middle East, and we living in the northern hemisphere aren't truly accustomed to desert-like conditions; without doubt their heat is a dry one, albeit of such a ferocity that it can very well threaten human existence in its excess of weather conditions.

Human existence in the Ottawa Valley was celebrating the relief brought to us by a succession of thunderstorms cleansing the atmosphere and clearing it of the high humidity we've been languishing under for far too long. We drove yesterday morning along the eastern Parkway and there were plenty of people out on the walkways running, walking dogs, riding bicycles. The Ottawa River glistened in the sun just beyond the Parkway

When we arrived at the Byward Market the place was crammed with people ambling about, looking at the handicrafts, jewellery, fruits and vegetables, honey and other products for sale at the outdoor stalls. My husband slipped quickly into the magazine shop he frequents (which also sells a panoply of hookah and other types of smoking devices, colourfully exotic and attractive-forbidden in appearance) and then we set off for our intended destination for the early afternoon; Gatineau Park.

We meant to take advantage of the relatively cool temperatures, the exhilarating breeze, the weaker sun impact, to take one of the hikes available to us in the park environment near colourful Chelsea, something we haven't done in a year. In the process, we would introduce Jack and Jill to woodland delights they haven't yet encountered so close to home.

It was a relief to leave the crowded marketplace with its mass of humanity doing what people love best to be engaged in, shopping, for our own preferred mode of entertainment, walking in a woodland atmosphere, enjoying nature at its best, with the most clement of weather to aid in that enterprise.