When you're at home, warm and snug on a Saturday morning, breakfast behind you and the day stretching before you, waiting to be spent in quality efforts to make the most of the day (Carpe Diem!) you have choices. If we had an actual list in this family, nature would always top it, to get out into a natural setting and immerse ourselves in it. It's what we call enjoying life to its fullest.

Well, this is a fall Saturday, and though my husband cannot yet return to sharing these daily adventures with me and our two little puppies, after doing the necessaries in the house I did, as usual, venture out with Jackie and Jillie. It is cold, granted, and there's a stiff wind, and the sky is crowded with steel-grey clouds so one might assume the weather could be more cooperative. It rained last night, just as it did the day before and the day before that, so it would be guaranteed that the forest would be sodden, and it was.

But it is also breath-takingly beautiful. Everywhere you look it's brilliant technicolour. In fact, from time to time, particularly when the prevailing wind ushers a flurry of brightly-hued foliage from their perches on branches reluctant to see them off, and there's a resemblance to a rainfall of lazily falling yellow leaves, you can be lost in the impression that this is really a wonderful dream you're wandering through.

Jackie and Jillie seem to think so, they behave as though they're just as entranced as I am. The wonder of it is that we seem to be a distinct minority. In an hour's ramble, we came across no one else; no happy dogs walking their humans. Granted, people who are in the workforce and raising families have other imperatives on a day off, but I seem to recall with a good degree of accuracy that we were once among them, and it was always a priority for us to take our children out for walks in natural settings. There was always enough time to do other things that needed doing.

And those in the nearby neighbourhoods of this community fortunate enough to have this wonderful ravined woodland as a natural access point to an active, quality lifestyle who are retired would do themselves a favour in so many ways to rouse themselves to get out for a daily walk in the woods. It's there, as a recreational opportunity of huge dimensions of value; physical and psychological; becalming to the spirit, if only it were recognized and taken advantage of.

Why it remains a place where so few venture will never fail to puzzle us.