Yesterday's activities in the general population reflected a mass psychosis of shopping frenzy in hopes of finding irresistible bargains during Boxing Day sales. Weather was truly atrocious; windy, icy-cold and freezing rain to top off the accumulation of snow we had covering all outdoor surfaces. But nothing deters dedicated shoppers and they were out in droves irrespective of driving conditions and warnings that it might be a good idea, under the prevailing circumstances to stay off area roads.

By the time we went off to sleep last night the temperature had begun falling, and icy precipitation turned to something more approximating ordinary rain. We've no idea how long it rained but when we arose in the morning it was no longer raining and the temperature was still down, just under freezing, and the great outdoors looked like one giant skating rink.

What had been lightly packed snow on lawns and heavily packed snow on roadways was now thick layers of brittle, shiny, slippery ice. Making for driving conditions as problematical as yesterday's.

We strapped cleats over our boots, wrapped Jackie and Jillie in little sweaters (for the cold), jackets (for the wind), their harnesses (for a gentler leash guidance) and made off to the ravine. Although the temperature was still just above zero by then, the humidity and the wind made it seem much colder. Walking up the street to access the ravine entrance was an exercise in ice-management underfoot, but the cleats do their job wonderfully well. The entire road was ice-covered and over the ice, melted ice.

In the ravine, the trails were hard-crusted snow and ice, though nothing like the road, and our progress was just fine, though there was a bit of a drag on bootsteps that sink into the crusted snow with each step.

The creek was in fairly full flow, with all the snow and ice that has melted over the last few days running into the forested waterway. It looks wider, and certainly muddier than it would ever appear under other conditions. We came across a few other trail hikers and their accompanying dog companions, so our two had a nice bit of a run with them.

What a weather roller-coaster, a mixed-bag of nature's capricious tricks this past several weeks has been. We've hip-hopped from seasonal-premature icy temperatures to mild days with plenty of snow events, and on to today's blip of minus-9 C. with freezing rain. Everything is covered with a crust of ice. No doubt people out frantically shopping for Boxing Day miracles are cursing the condition of the roads.

Only yesterday Jackie and Jillie were having fun in the ravine on a moderate-atmospheric day with a friendly Weinmaraner, all of them loping about in the snow-packed forest, challenging one another to award of the most fleet-footed, and today our little fellows are looking at us as though we're denying them their quotidian measure of exhilarating exercise posing as an opportunity for social entertainment.

Questioning Jackie

But the thermometer has been stuck at minus nine degrees, give or take a point or two of a degree, with ample wind to exacerbate the cold, interspersed with random frozen droplets of pinging rain pellets. Presenting us with little choice but to pass on this day's ravine ramble with our two little companions.

Forlorn Jillie

For one thing, in this type of deep cold with wind, they need boots to enable them to stay out for any length of time. And those boots will not grip the ice as well as their clawed paws have the ability to do, leaving them slithering backwards in trying to ascend any of the ravine  hills. For another, though their humans have the option of wearing cleats over their boots, the combination of freezing rain and icy winds is somewhat less than appealing.

All the more so as one of us is still recovering from open heart surgery and the more atmospherically miserable it is out, the more hazardous it will be for him in terms of well-being in his recovery even though we've both taken pneumonia-preventive vaccinations. In this instance caution is much, much more the better part of valour.

Yesterday morning brought us more snow amid plunging temperatures. Looking out the front door at the snow tumbling from the sky and the soft, fluffy stuff clinging to the trees in the garden recalled visions as a child of a winter wonderland, a not incorrect impression of what we live with in our climate for four months of each year. It was mild enough yesterday that snow melted off the metal-roofed canopy on the deck at the back of the house, while the burden of snow was measurably reduced on snow roofs.

It was deeply overcast, however, so much so that it seemed as though there was a fog enveloping us when the snow did eventually stop at mid-day. Which is when we went out for our daily ravine hike in the forest contiguous with the streets in our near neighbourhood. Wind had by then whipped the snow from tree branches, and enough people had been out that day to take advantage of milder temperatures and the vision of newfallen snow in a forest to tamp the trails down nicely.

Sun, and colder temperatures, along with a windchill has returned today, however. We're grateful for a snug, warm house. This is a house when we're surrounded by the vibrant colours of summer whenever we look out one of the windows of our home. Perhaps it's far more accurate to say, 'whenever we look at one of the windows of our home'.

So we have light and dancing colour and ephemeral visions of another season surrounding us whatever the season outside. This house is never moody, but it is serene and suffused with a sweet gracefulness that is comforting while at the same time steeped in visual excitement. Thanks to my enterprising, aesthetics-conscious, skilled husband whose design and construction of those windows gladdens our vision and warms our souls.

Last week's plunging temperatures where daytime highs struggled to get above minus-16-degrees Celsius, engineered the freezing-over of the creek down in the ravine. But it seems the ice hadn't penetrated all that deeply. By yesterday, under the influence of succeeding days of almost tropical warmth when day-time highs reached zero-C., the creek ice had melted and water was running freely again. It takes moving water longer to freeze, obviously, than standing water, and the trend reversed itself.

And so, one supposes it wasn't all that surprising to see flocks of over-wintering robins flitting about by the creek. In the winter months, those robins that decide not to migrate south tend to gather in clusters. And we're informed by local ornithologists that there is ample in the way of food for them all. They tend to alter their feeding patterns from searching out live meals like earthworms to foraging about in apple trees, or looking for bittersweet berries or Hawthorne haws to feast on. Still, it's sad to see formerly migrating birds remain behind to tough out the bitter winter cold and high winds and icy pellets we tend to encounter.

Speaking of encountering, we did on our ravine ramble yesterday, see quite a few people out and about in the forest, walking the trails with their dogs. So Jackie and Jillie had the opportunity to roust about with other dogs, enlivening the quality of their walk.

We noticed that a mature poplar had at some time broken halfway up its trunk, leaving a tall snag and leading out from it, the other half that had broken off, still leaning on its broken shaft, the top caught in suspension on other trees. The reason we took note of the tree's unfortunate shape was that it presents as a potential danger, should blistering wind ever shove the top broken half off its perch onto the forest floor, since it is wedged directly above the trail where it crests after a long uphill climb from one of the valleys below a connecting bridge.

It -- as well as the poplars that our ravine-living beavers have gnawed halfway through and decided to abandon with winter's onset, perhaps to renew their harvesting in the spring -- represents a scenario that could occur that we'd prefer not to encounter.

There are lots of treed and grassy parks within walking distance of the street we live on, complete with playground equipment and sport rinks for children and others wanting to take advantage of these conveniently located assists to quality community living. We made the most of them when our granddaughter was young and we were her daycare providers until she was nine when her mother bought a rural property and our granddaughter began attending a commercial daycare centre out of school hours.

She is now twenty years old and in her third year at University of Toronto with a goal to becoming a lawyer. Living in Toronto while she studies and returning to her rural home at holidays and during the summer months.

When she first moved to their rural address though we continued to see them often, I thought it would be a good experience for our granddaughter to learn to express herself through letter-writing, so I launched a bit of an experiment. It didn't last very long. While our granddaughter was happy enough to receive letters, since I also included funny little incidents and jokes I'd discovered online in those letters to tickle her fancy, she wasn't all that keen on reciprocating, though she did.

Yesterday, while idly looking through a few things I came across one of her letters. The envelope, at least the back of it, was well worth retaining. I had taken to enclosing with my letters to her, a stamped, self-addressed envelope to make it easier for her to write back to us. And she had taken to embellishing the back of the envelope where she obviously sought to match my humour with her own.

And the letter itself demonstrated her growing confidence in writing cursive. The content was flippant and added nothing to our daily telephone conversations, but it was an experiment that I thought might be useful to her in becoming acquainted with an older, perhaps quaint method of communication beyond email and texting.

A couple we've known for years, some thirty years younger than us, who have experienced their share of fear and anguish through a dread medical condition, hugged my husband yesterday early afternoon when we came across each other on one of the trails in the forest. A year ago our friend Barry underwent surgery that opened his cranium so that a shunt could be put in place that reaches from his brain to his stomach, where it drains the fluid accumulating in his brain.

Barry is an amateur athlete, concerned with his health and his physical condition, involving himself in competitive running and bicycling, a member of the RCMP's SWAT teams, accustomed to responding to hard emergency situations requiring strength of force. Or he was, before his medical condition forced him into retirement. He still is involved in competitive sports. But he is no longer the man we'd known who suffered from nausea, dizzy spells and blackouts.

So he and his wife Sheila had a fairly good idea what we had gone through in the aftermath of my husband's open-heart surgery. And so they were immensely pleased to see my husband out in the ravine for what has for decades been our normal daily recreational hike through the ravined forest where we often meet them. And the hugs were warm and sustained and appreciated.

Only a week earlier I was informed that another of our friends, a similar age to Barry who had described to me his years-earlier episode of heart failure and recovery, is now scheduled for a January surgery to implant a cardiac pacemaker. Rob is a giant of a man, easily six-foot, four-inches in height and with the physiognomy to match. He'd had no warning of his impending heart failure, no indication in the way of symptoms.

And nor did my husband experience any of the classic symptoms that might have alerted us to his compromised heart condition with a compromised (attributed to an undiagnosed and unsuspected previous heart attack) mitral valve that was struggling to perform and major arteries that had become incapable of supplying sufficient oxygen and blood to his heart, through blockage. But invasive nuclear-medicine tests pinpointed the problem interpreted by a cardiac specialist who advised that with my husband's otherwise-excellent physical health he was a good candidate for surgery to preserve the assurance of a trouble-free future.

I can hardly myself believe that I'm no longer on my own, without the presence of my husband accompanying us, taking our two little dogs into the ravine for their daily trysts with nature and other dogs whose walkers are dedicated to immersing themselves for brief periods in this natural setting in our community that so much enhances the quality of our lives in so many ways, from providing a superb recreational opportunity to those interested, to cleansing the air of impurities that accumulate in any urban setting.

We were certainly apprehensive. On previous occasions, my husband had descended the first long hill into the ravine, timed to meet me and our puppies at the conclusion of our hour-like hike. Descending and ascending that hill gave us an idea of just how ready he might be to undertake a far more sustained amble in the forest requiring multiple ascents and descents. But we took our time and but for very brief pauses when we crested hills, this first excursion post-surgery while still in recovery mode went exceedingly well.

I am grateful beyond measure.

I used to regularly bake croissants to serve with Friday-night dinner. I haven't done so in ages. They're simple enough to produce; using any kind of white-yeast-raised dough -- but the best is an egg-infused one, as for Challah -- rolling out the dough into a circle, spreading with Becel margarine, folding it over into itself, rolling out again into a circle and repeating at least three times before the final roll-out; slicing the circle into triangles, then rolling them into crescents to rise and bake until crisp-brown.

Since we were snowed in on Sunday with really frigid temperatures, the day-time high not wanting to budge above minus-16 C., I cooked a lentil soup for dinner and thought crescents would complement the soup quite well. So, I also made croissants to serve with the soup. This morning, at breakfast time, my husband had the left-over croissants toasted for breakfast.

Now, since we're still snowbound, but not enough to keep us from our usual ravine trek with our little dogs, I'm going to prepare another meal I haven't made in ages. When our children were young I often would make baked beans to serve with shredded cheddar cheese, in the winter. It was nourishing and good-tasting, and it occurred to me, searching about in my memory files of recipes that this was another nutritious meal that had been neglected over the years.

Yesterday, we had a roasted Cornish hen with Tex-Mex seasoning, served with an egg-noodle-raisin pudding and asparagus, with mangoes and cherries for dessert. Colourful, fragrant and nicely filling with all the protein, carbohydrates and fats any well-fed family might take for granted with essential nutrients, vitamins and minerals we require for healthy living.

And mighty good-tasting, too. No winter blahs around the dining table.

It was in a nice little bookshop in a small town in New Hampshire where we acquired our original copy of Into the Silence, The Great War, Mallory, and the Conquest of Everest by Wade Davis. About three years ago, perhaps four. My husband, knowing how interested I am in the Himalaya and mountaineering had pointed it out to me, and it was a must-have.

We'd always visit that little store for the past ten years or so when we were in the area on our annual Waterville Valley getaways to revisit old familiar mountain trails and the sublime landscape we had become familiar with, our children in tow, over the course of some thirty-forty years or so. Our granddaughter too, on those occasions when she accompanied us in later years, looked forward to that book shop excursion.

We were surprised but not shocked to discover several years back that the shop had closed. It had been located in a half-empty mall, and it was obvious that the town, in a winter-skiing area, had been attempting to reinvent itself as a tourist draw. With its closing, only a larger second-hand rather tawdry bookshop was left for the locals to frequent. It had Internet services which the smaller bookshop hadn't had.

There was another bookshop some miles distant in another, larger town which was a bigger draw for tourism. We once thought we'd shop there only to find we weren't welcome with our over-the-shoulder bag holding our little toy poodle, Riley. Their loss in custom, but our loss in an enjoyable book-shopping site closed off to us.

"Geographers had long suspected that the earth, flattened at the poles, was not a perfect sphere. But the extent of the distortion, of critical importance to science and cartography, was unknown. The Great Trigonometrical Survey set out in 1806 to solve the mystery by calibrating with a precision previously unimagined the true shape of the planet, the curvature of the globe, by measuring an arc of longitude across the face of India. The basic idea was rather straightforward: if one can establish three visible points in a landscape, and if one knows the distance between two, one can measure at each of these the angle to the third, unknown point and, with trigonometry, determine its distance and position. Once the third point has been thus established, it can form with one of the known points the base of a new triangle from which the coordinates of a new reference point on the horizon, often a mountain or other prominent landscape, can be established. Thus, over time, a chain of triangles was created, a Great Arc that ran sixteen hundred miles south to north over the length of the subcontinent.
Distance was determined with calibrated chains and measuring rods, which implied teams of men hacking through jungles, crossing swamps, climbing across the face of glaciers. To measure the angles with the requisite precision required the finest of instruments, enormous brass theodolites that weighed as much as a thousand pounds and needed a dozen men to be carried. Essentially elaborate telescopes that could pivot both vertically and horizontally to measure all angles in a plane, these theodolites had to be mounted, erect and perfectly immobile, on a circular platform bolted to the top of a thirteen-yard-long spar, which itself was dug into the ground and secured by long stays. A second platform, complete with scaffolding, had to be built alongside so that the observer might take the measurements. The slightest movement of the theodolite would render the calculations useless.
For more than forty years, the intrepid members of the Survey of India, supported by armies of laborers who suffered and died by the score, marched these exquisite instruments across the length of the subcontinent. Their seasons were short and desperate, for only with the monsoon did the haze clear and the dust settle from the air. Tormented with fevers, perched in the ice on the summits of mountains, or in empty deserts where thirty-foot platforms had to be built of stones, they meticulously recorded their observations. Quite literally nothing stood in their way. If necessary to establish a point of triangulation and properly position a theodolite, they razed entire villages, leveled sacred hills, and crashed into fragments the facades of ancient temples.
By the 1830s the Great Arc had reached the foothills of the Himalaya, the highest and youngest mountains on earth, a wall of white peaks a hundred miles deep, stretching in a gentle curve for fifteen hundred miles, from the Brahmaputra to the Indus, a distance, the British would discover, equal to that of London to the Urals of Russia. Here the members of the survey would hesitate before branching east and west, through the foothills and the malarial forests of the Terai, where a new series of baselines would be established, marked by observation posts built of mud bricks, also thirty feet high, from which they would look up and stare into the hidden heights of a mountain range that fired their imaginations. Above the heat and dust of the Indian plain, rising out of the forests of Burma, were more than a thousand mountains that soared beyond 20,000 feet, elevations scarcely comprehensible to the European mind."
Into the Silence, The Great War, Mallory, and the Conquest of Everest, Wade Davis, c.2011

The evidence speaks for itself. Guilty.

Of amassing a citadel-full of books. For we are a book-loving, an avariciously book-loving family. I could add full-stop, but it's inappropriate, since we are also committed to reading all those books, for reading is our most favourite and valued activity as thinking human beings, curious about everything around us.

When we were children together, 14, and 15 years of age, one of the many and particularly special activities we undertook together was to visit our local library. We shared a passion even then, for literature. One of the first expenses we incurred together when we were first married at 18, was to 'join' a book-of-the-month club, and on our meagre income, would buy books offered by mail, at a pittance of the price, needless to say, sixty years ago, than books now sell for.

Over the years we amassed a treasury of books, classics that are meant to be kept, to be consulted on occasion, and to give assurance to the owner that the words of wisdom and beauty of language, and range of experiences contained therein could be assessed at will, at any time, in one's own space. Our raw greed for books has never diminished. Each time my husband goes out to the library, he looks about at the small area operated by 'friends of the library', where donated books and de-acquisitioned books are displayed for sale, at giveaway prices.

This past Saturday he came back from the library with a typical -- well, a few more than usual, to be truthful -- load of books to add to our already-voluminous library at home. Oh yes, we do have our own library, a room devoted to shelves of books. One of the first things my husband did when we moved into our current home was to transform a rather open room overlooking the foyer, into a book-shelved library. He used lumber from British Columbia lodgepole pine to produce the shelving.

For me he brought back A Woman Among Warlords - the Extraordinary Story of an Afghan Who Dared to Raise her Voice, Malalai Joya; Hana's Suitcase by Karen Levine, and Into the Silence, The Great War, Mallory, and the Conquest of Everest by Wade Davis. My husband didn't realize we already own a copy of the last one, and I read it and found it superbly written and ultra-fascinating; he has not yet read it but I will now urge him to.

For himself he brought back Xenophon's Retreat, Greece, Persia & The End Of The Golden Age by Robin Waterfield (this is one I'll read, too), The First Inspector Morse Omnibus by Colin Dexter and Great Books, My Adventures with Homer, Rousseau, Woolf, and Other Indestructible Writers of the Western World by David Denby. Oh yes, and a veritable tome of a love paean to Chocolate and Coffee containing a full range of mouth-watering recipes, which we will both share.

More fodder for our reading passion.

This is what my night table looks like:

And here is a bookshelf in the basement study:

Here bookshelves in the basement exercise room:

Another:

Yet another:

The coffee table in the family room:

Bookshelf in the upstairs hallway:

Bookshelf in a spare bedroom:

Soon there will be no room left for the people who value these books to move comfortably around while selecting the next book they mean to devour....

Added to the extremely frigid temperatures this week it is once again snowing. The night before, the thermometer dipped to minus-26 degrees C. and rose to a balmy minus-16 degrees, with a lighter wind quotient than the vicious gusts we experienced on Friday with equally cold temperatures. Last night it was only minus-19 degrees, and this morning when we first took our little dogs out to the backyard it was a relatively mild minus-12 degrees, with snow falling, and just a light wind.

When we look out our front door, this is what we see:

When we look out our patio doors it looks like this:

So we shelter in our warm and comfortable homes, reflecting our safe and secure lives.

We know, from reading the newspapers and on the Internet -- that the ancient historical city of Aleppo in Syria with its fabled past as a primary trading route on the Silk Road -- it is also cold and damp. There, people are sleeping on the streets since their normal shelter in the past of their normal lives is no longer available to them. Men, women and children are daily exposed to thunderous explosions from an ongoing barrage of bombs courtesy of the Syrian military and the fly-by assistance of Russian warplanes.

Thousands of Sunni Syrians have been killed in the last month in Aleppo by the Alawite Shiite regime of Bashar al-Assad, a bloody tyrant determined to wrest back all of his imperial territory from the impudent "terrorists" who themselves believe they are opponents of his regime because of the inequalities they have long suffered under a minority Shiite government accustomed to making life miserable for Syria's majority Sunni civilians. During the course of this civil war, a half-million Syrian lives have been snuffed out.

The military onslaught of a destroyed east Aleppo where Sunni Syrians know they are targets, and where they are safe nowhere from the casual and deliberate dropping of barrel bombs, chemical infused bombs and artillery is relentless. Hiding in ancient mosques will not save them, these heritage sites have been bombed into rubble. Health-care providers and their patients have been deliberately targeted along with the hospitals that sought to treat the victims of state violence. Schools for children to attend are no longer viable.

The thought uppermost in their parents' minds was how to feed their children, and keep them from death.

People weep as they are forced to leave their beloved city in east Aleppo. While in the city's western half, curious Alawite defenders of the regime live out their normal lives while witnessing from balconies adjacent the areas being bombarded, the carnage their neighbours suffer.

The sanctimonious 'regrets' and statements of compassion heard from the United Nations and world leaders merely reflect the disinterest of the world at large to intervene forcefully, where diplomacy has failed to aid the maimed and battered Syrians pleading for rescue and haven from the death that inexorably stalks them, while their president congratulates himself on having achieved his goal; the destruction of opposition to his capriciously deadly rule.
                     

Karam Almasri: The main entrance to a surgical hospital in eastern Aleppo after it was hit by bombardments: MSF

The Winter Solstice may not yet have arrived, but you mightn't know it from our current temperatures. Years ago, minus-20-degree weather would never have kept us from our daily ramble in the woods. But yesterday's minus-16-degrees with a brutal wind certainly did. Although we had only very light flurries intermittently, the gusting winds carried previous days' snow off rooftops and created white-outs as the sparkling crystals flew through the air like a school of minuscule fish spontaneously turning into a submissive white veil.

We did go out, but only to do the food shopping. And that turned out to be no picnic. Even traversing the short distance from where the car was parked to the entrance of the supermarket was a challenge, the wind ripping through the atmosphere that was itself icy-frigid. It made one -- me, in any event -- think of summiting Mount Everest.

Every time we took Jackie and Jillie out to the backyard, they turned into tiny lunatics, racing about madly, challenging one another to footsie duels, wrestling and trying to make up for our not taking them out for a ravine walk, yesterday. That lasted until they were suddenly overtaken by the realization that this cold combined with the fact that they kept racing off the shovelled pathway into deep snow, or something, made their tiny paws hurt, and they weren't able to raise them all simultaneously for relief.

The temperature plunged to minus-26 overnight, but the wind subsided. This morning when they were first taken out, it was minus-21, anything but balmy, yet tolerable without the wind. Last night, when we settled into bed, my husband realized that I'd changed the duvet from the fall one to the winter one, and the bedsheets from flannel to the much warmer fleece sets. And we were extraordinarily comfortable and comforted.

This morning, the usual discussion took place about preferences for a baked goody, and I offered, date squares, lemon cupcakes, raisin pie, or Chelsea buns. My husband's face lit up, asking if it wouldn't be too much trouble to produce Chelsea buns. So Chelsea buns it is.

At various times in their lives many people gravitate to natural settings to find solitude and peace, to rest their minds for however brief a period of time, from the weight of problems and emotionally unsettling occurrences in their lives. The ambiance of a green environment, strolling along a forest path has the capacity to soothe an unhappily restive heart. At the very least to give pause to the depth of emotions that sometimes overwhelm people.

Yesterday was a fairly cold day. The high temperature for the day was minus-6 degrees C., and there was a stiff wind, to augment the frigid atmosphere. On the positive side, it was also sunny, although usually the forest canopy, even in winter, shields the sun from penetrating too deeply in the woods. We, myself and our two little dogs, had almost completed our daily circuit in the woods, and were well on our way to approaching the last bridge in our good-sized wooded ravine that graces a fairly large neighbourhood, when we came across a beautiful looking young woman.

Of course, to me, any woman around forty years of age, from my perspective of having reached twice that age, looks young to me. And she was beautiful, a lovely, smiling face, happy to see our two little dogs who were leaping about her excitedly, wanting to be noticed and petted, and she was more than willing to oblige.

As so often happens, even when coming across people you've never before seen, there is often a tendency to linger and to strike up a conversation. And it can be surprising how anxious people are sometimes to acquaint people they don't know with surprising intimate details of their lives. The simple fact is, there are occasions when people simply have no one to talk to who will listen to them. And so, I listened.

It began with the woman mentioning how important she feels it is for families to introduce valued animal companions to their children's lives, that it helps them to become more compassionate as human beings, valuing other creatures and learning the meaning and depth of love in another dimension to that which occurs through dependency and lifelong exposure. Their family has a cat which they love unreservedly, now 14 years old, and she couldn't imagine the quality of their lives without their cat.

And then she spoke of her two children who were so different from one another in their characters. One, who doggedly pursued areas of interest and on his own initiative learns what he needs to know to become functional and comfortable, and the other making passive efforts and generally failing in areas where he should be excelling because he has the potential. And when he fails he usually blames others, never willing to admit that he hasn't made the required effort.

Without doubt, most mothers could relate entirely to this woman's exasperation with her 17- and 20-year-old sons. The concern that mothers have for their offspring is fairly well unconditional, and we want only for them what will make them happy, give them satisfaction in life. Despite all our efforts and our best intentions, and if we're fortunate, that of a father who stands alongside the mother, children develop their own ways of facing life. The values they will have absorbed through their familial exposure may remain intact, but other facets of the management of life opportunities and priorities will reflect the individual's personality and inherited outlook.

I finally broke away, after we had spoken for a while. I was concerned twofold; that our little dogs' paws would become too cold from prolonged exposure where they sat, waiting for me to continue our walk, and I was anxious as well, that if my husband decided to venture into the ravine to meet us, our tardiness would ensure that he would venture too far and it would have a deleterious effect on him.

So on we went, and soon both Jackie and Jillie broke away from me, racing ahead, with Jackie returning but Jillie nowhere in sight as I called to her and we rounded corners and she couldn't be seen ahead, approaching the last bridge. When that happened I was fairly certain it was because my husband had come down the long hill into the ravine, crossed the bridge and began venturing uphill again to meet us, and soon I saw him in the distance with both of our little dogs leaping happily about him.

This frigid weather and high wind is too hard on his lungs and he is susceptible to pneumonia, post-surgery, even though he was inoculated against it. When he expects to be out in this kind of weather for any length of time, he wraps a woollen scarf around the lower part of his face. It is almost three months since his surgery, and his sternum has to heal completely before he extends himself too far physically.

But when I saw him didn't my heart soar and lift me bodily into another plane of existence entirely!