Retired from active employment, we still have a tendency to view Saturdays as special 'days off'. Little wonder since societal convention has children attending school from Monday to Friday and when their school days are over with maturity, working from Monday to Friday. It's natural that we all develop a habit of celebrating Saturdays as 'free' days to do with as we will. It's never as simple as that, of course, since the busy work-week decrees that so-called 'free' days are full of chores we haven't been able to look after during the working day.

Saturdays are often -- though our intelligence tells us it's not a good day to do things where others have the same idea and those venues are bound to be crowded with like-minded others, while our emotions urge us otherwise -- when we tend to want to do things out of habit. We do tend to avoid shopping on Saturdays, since that's obviously when many people in the workforce tend to catch up with things, but we do choose to go places where it's possible many others would also like to congregate.

We decided against going up to Gatineau again; on the cusp of a long week-end it would, we thought, surely be crowded with the presence of others thinking as we do, to get away to natural surroundings that are a little different than our usual urban forest locations. Then we thought of another forested area that we hadn't visited in over a year, a place we often used to go to with Button and Riley, but have neglected since we have the convenience of our own wooded ravine right adjacent our street.

Off we went, the fairly short twenty-minute drive west to arrive at the parking lot operated by the National Capital Commission for the extensive interwoven network of trails at the Mer Bleue forest. The parking lot, often quite full when we pass by, this time held only four vehicles besides our own. The area is a mixture of forest, some swampy areas and overgrown meadow, some of it hugely attractive, some not so much. An area long ago logged out and since partially self-regenerated and partly reforested with pines that have grown over the years. It looks far different than how it did presented when we first used to take the trails there, a quarter-century earlier.

There is now an extensive area of boardwalk built over the boggy terrain that tends to get very wet in spring and fall. And there are large areas of the forest where the trees are old and large and the understory is completely colonized with large ferns, the bracken pushing out all other types of undergrowth, giving the landscape there a quite exotic look and feel, since it also tends to be extremely humid. In other areas white baneberry proliferates, as does purple loosstrife, thimbleberry, dogwood, asters and goldenrod, at this particular time of year.

The land is mostly flat, though there is a ridge on either side, where the land droops away, and here and there marshy areas with cattails and waterlilies can be seen, the water rippled now and again as frogs hop about within and without. There is no hiking challenge of rises and depressions in the landscape, but the trails can go on at some length, some of them far more attractive than others. Nature-lovers maintain a proliferation of bird feeders on some parts of the trails, hanging them from tree branches and filled from fall throughout winter to early spring. Chickadees famously group in specific areas and have become tame enough to land on outstretched hands.

During our hour-and-a-half hike through the area we came across two groups of developmentally-delayed adults being guided by volunteers and institution-workers through the broader of the trails. Yesterday was extremely hot and humid; with a prevailing breeze, and under the canopy the atmosphere felt fine, in those areas where overhanging trees were scarce, exposure to the sun made it extremely uncomfortable. It's a varied landscape, and interesting for that alone. One fall we came across a murder of crows, thunderously filling the air with a cacophony of calls, perched on every branch of every tree we could see, on the outskirts of the forest.