After Sunday's all-day rain, the forest in the ravine adjacent our street is beginning to dry out nicely. The cool weather has done little to hasten the appearance of wildflowers, however. The initial sprinkling of trilliums we saw a week ago hasn't increased. We will need more sun and milder temperatures to encourage the blossoms. And that formula is on its way. The week-end at least is forecasted to be warm and sunny, so we're expecting that trout lilies will finally show their shy little yellow heads, and so will our crimson trilliums.

On our ravine walk yesterday everything looked rather glumly bleak under overcast skies. There is little colour in the ravine; green yes, because of the evergreens' presence, and a bit of light colour due to the stubbornness of autumn-dried foliage remaining on immature beech trees and ironwood.

We were surprised to see that the pounding rain and wind of the day before had resulted in the maples dropping their bright red little flowerets, sprinkling them onto the forest floor. You'd need a magnifying glass, however, to boast them as bursts of colour enlivening the landscape.

The allure of spring-released odours continues to fascinate Jack and Jill, curious about the meaning of all these irresistible smells. To dogs, with their enhanced sense of smell it must be like opening an informatively compelling local newsletter with all manner of gossip and news so intriguing to the human mind; for dogs it is similar, however alternately-oriented.

Ambling up the street on the way to the ravine, if we look over the roofs of the houses opposite our own side of the street we can make out a faint haze of greenish-yellow tinting the forest canopy, and this is the steeple-height of poplars in the ravine, preparing to burst out into tender foliage, just awaiting the spur that sun and a warming trend signals.

As for the small proliferation of shrubs beside the trails other than the larger specimens of dogwood, honeysuckle and hazelnut, their brief period of minuscule and tender red-green foliage have tentatively begun to flush out the bare stalks appealingly with the promise of more, far more to come.