These last few weeks when we're hiking through the forest trails, there's an indelible crunch beneath our boots as we break the unseen ice lingering under and throughout the forest floor buried in the season's burden of desiccating foliage, an almost uniform colour of beige, with variations tinged with yellow and orange if you look closely enough. But not where poplars predominate; when their leaves were freshly fallen they were an absolute delight of mellow yellow and streaks of pink here and there. When they deteriorate with age and begin their crumbling stage the mass of poplar foliage turns an unpleasant uniform grey, and looking closely enough at that, there are streaks of darker grey, black.

The crunch our boots make represents the turning point between mid-fall and late-fall and the imminent arrival of snow. There was snow predicted to fall yesterday when we were out, but it failed to materialize. Instead the precipitation descended as freezing rain. Because the ice-rain was fairly thick we waited beyond the point where we usually strike out for our daily ramble, and there was a hiatus, so off we went. And for the most part of our hour-plus time in the ravine we were free of the rain, but for the last quarter-hour.

At minus-2C, very damp and somewhat windy, the atmosphere was not what you might consider good-natured. It was a cheery event, though when we ran across a young man we hadn't seen in some time. When we occasionally come across his mother, walking their pitbull-mix sweet-natured dog Jasper, she's told us he's been busy, working several jobs, but mostly he was apprenticed to a carpenter and working in the building trades.

Over the years he had told us of his hopes and dreams of becoming a police officer. He had taken academic courses to guide him toward making that aspiration a reality, but all his applications to various police forces have been turned down, one after another, although initially he had high hopes. Wrong gender, wrong ethnic origin in a politically correct atmosphere of giving precedence to those whose qualifications might not be equal, but their optics viewed as desirable.

Another young man living directly beside us whom we've known for decades has had the very same experience. He had been in the reserves, he had worked for a security firm, and he too had applied countless times, asking us to act as his character surety, but all to no avail. He had no wish to go into the military, he wanted to be a civilian police officer, but he too now works regularly for a security company.

Jasper's young man is still in the construction trades. He likes carpentry. He's resigned to not succeeding in achieving a place with a police force. And he's looking, with his fiance, to buy an older house wherever they can find one at a reasonable price -- and that too seems like a mirage these days -- that they can fix up together. She has a good secure job with the government and the health and other benefits accruing to that kind of employment helps with their future plans.

When we parted, we wished him good luck. Unemployment figures remain stable locally but the truth of the matter is, when new jobs come available they are invariably part-time, with no level of security attached to them. Young people these days are faced with a far different job market than we had, in our time, unless they have the good fortune to have marketable skills impressive enough to be hired. Yet even acquiring the academic professionalism that once guaranteed good employment and a good future, no longer can be counted on as guarantees of achieving either.

Oh, and that snow we were supposed to be on the receiving end of? It did, after all, materialize. And we were greeted with the view of it this morning out our front door. Our introduction to winter.