We hadn't gone far into the ravine this early afternoon when we came across a old ravine friend of ours. First, we saw Toby, a small terrier-mix, still a happy-go-lucky, though now deaf, scruffy little dog who was one of our little Riley's first ravine pals. Riley was in second heaven, following Toby into one of the creek tributaries for the first time, coming out coated with muck, but sublimely happy about the experience, both of them romping happily through the woods together.

Riley is gone, it will be almost a year in a few months' time, and Toby is still meandering about, but rarely now in the ravine. He is taken more often to the west end, where one of his owner's daughters lives, and where her own mother, at 92, is installed in a full-care old-age home. Our friend, in fact, has taken a break out from painting the interior of her house. She's cleaning and tidying it up, painting it in neutral colours, at the advice of her daughter, a real-estate agent.

Her daughter has introduced her to a small, two-bedroom bungalow in nearby Almonte, owned by an elderly couple prepared to move, and she was smitten with the place. Its owners had prepared their little house for sale, just as her daughter had urged her to do; removing from it most vestiges of the personality of their owners, as an invitation to prospective buyers to move right in and make it their very own. And this she was prepared to do, but first had to sell her own house, the very house where she had raised her daughters, with her husband.

They had been married for 33 years, when he died. We had known him only slightly; for the most part it was she whom we'd always come across in the ravine over the years. The area in which they lived was distant from our own; the ravine is what brought us together. Her relationship with her husband was one of mutual independence; their closeness was occasioned by the formality of the marriage bond, not an emotional intimacy of mutual need. After he died and his absence mourned, she found another companion with whom she had more of an informal partnership, and she thrived within it.

Two years ago -- since that was how long it has been since we last saw her -- that man too died. She had received a sudden telephone call informing her that he'd had an accident. He had been out with his brother and they'd been drinking, so both were feeling a bit tingly, as it were. They had parted when their evening together was over, each to return to their respective homes. Her partner had gone down a flight of stairs in an underground pass on his way to access public transit, when he missed a step and fell down four concrete steps. That was what it took to end his life.

As he fell it seemed he had attempted to right himself and in the process fell on his back, then fell from side to side, each side of his skull hitting another step as he continued falling, causing blunt force trauma to his brain of a severity from which he never recovered. He was in a deep coma for several days, and then he died.

She found his eyeglasses tucked into one of the pockets of the jacket he was wearing, and hypothesized that he hadn't been wearing them at the time of the accident, because he tended to use them only for reading, though they were bifocals meant as well for long distance. She thought he might have been looking at or dialling his cellphone, so his attention was elsewhere as he went down the stairs with the evening's dim lighting and his slight state of inebriation complicating things.