Thinking back, I'd estimate it's been twenty years that we've been getting flu shots seasonally without fail from age 60 forward. This year, the flu inoculation has been far less than successful; the formula missed targeting the strain, a more serious variant than usual. As a result, the number of cases of confirmed flu have skyrocketed, in some instances with dreadfully dire consequences to both young and old.

I'd been mentally congratulating our good fortune just recently that we've managed to get through another winter where neither my husband nor I have come down with a cold or flu virus. Not all that unusual for us, actually. Although it's also true that for as long as I can remember my husband acquired some kind of debilitating virus around the arrival of spring. And I rarely 'caught' that virus, whatever it was, from him.

Enter spring of 2018 and suddenly he was struck with a sore throat and running nose. As the days progressed his symptoms began to resemble that of the flu with respiratory and fatigue symptoms  and a night-time chill, just as his nasal passages were drying up. All of which meant that his daily forays into the ravine for our regular walks on forest trails with our little dogs had to be suspended.

He's been steadily improving, while I did in fact, become infected with that virus bringing me a sore throat and lots of coughing up phlegm. Yesterday turned out a wonderfully pleasant day with full sun and not even a whisper of wind, and fairly warm at 2C, so he decided he'd had enough of seeing me off every afternoon with Jackie and Jillie as I headed out to the ravine. It was time, he said, that he resumed his normal activities.

So, after I'd cleaned the house (Monday is regular cleaning day), we gathered up our little dogs, dressed them in their little sweaters, not the winter coats they'd had to wear on previously colder days, and off we went. We were neither of us in top physical shape, but we took our time up and down the hills, and decided that a short circuit, not the longer one we usually take, would suffice to air us all out sufficiently and give us the opportunity to make the most of such a spectacularly lovely day.

We've a spate of milder days ahead, according to the folks at Environment Canada, though we had light snowflakes coming down this morning followed soon afterward by sun. Eventually the forest environment will succumb to the inevitable; the snowpack will melt, the forest floor revealed and the tree canopy will begin to treat us with visions of light green appearing like a mist of verdant shading throughout the forest landscape.