It's a puzzle to us how such a slender man of slight height as he can be out in cold, wet weather wearing a white shirt and over it only a light red unlined nylon windbreaker for warmth. His only concession to the cold during the really frigid days of winter is the addition of a toque and warm gloves. Perhaps on occasion a sweater under the jacket. He always uses two walking sticks to propel him along and he treks the forest trails at a speed we wouldn't want to emulate. Perhaps it's his Swiss origins.

He tells us that his brother in Switzerland last wrote about the drought causing strict bylaws to come into force against the excess use of water. Restraint, in fact, so severe that it impacts on daily life there; the use of water that we take for granted forbidden. Oddly enough, last week the very day that we were receiving snow flurries, so was Switzerland, early for both countries, he laughed as he regaled us as he often does, of what life in his village was like.

He once introduced us years ago, to a cousin who was visiting him from Switzerland. She was a relatively youthful-in-appearance and -bearing woman who obviously was comfortable hiking along in a forest setting with all the impediments of tree roots and rises and descents present, and at that time she was in her mid-80s. He himself is an exemplar of Swiss forbearance in embracing all weather that nature brings to try us and to delight us.

Yesterday we weren't tried, only delighted at the continuing mellow, golden prospect of the sun more easily penetrating a diminishing foliage-packed forest canopy to burnish the fallen leaves on the forest floor with illuminating sunshine. It doesn't in fact look real; more as though it has been staged, so theatrical does it look. And that is quite in character for much of what nature presents to us.

In the areas where the leaves first began falling weeks ago, mostly among the poplars, what was not so long ago scintillating with colour has embarked on its journey to becoming drab. Before long the richness of the piles of yellow leaves will become grey then black and the beauty will have disappeared until snow falls to cover it with its own blanket of virginal white.

In the early days when as puppies they encountered one another....

Halfway through our mostly sunny 4C, windy hike in the woods with Jackie and Jillie, a little excitement introduced itself when little impish Max turned up, a three-year-old miniature Apricot poodle. Max in his earlier days was a whirling dervish; as active, inquisitive and unrestrainedly reactive as Jackie and Jillie were in their puppy days, Max outdistanced them in manic activity. On the other hand, with our two it was precisely because there were two that their frantically acrobatic displays of discovery seemed so overwhelming; with Max you got a single whirlwind of action.

He has, however, like Jackie and Jillie slowed down somewhat. But his original spontaneous reaction to any kind of stimulation, like coming across other people and other dogs sprang into action yesterday as he scampered and raced about, while Jackie and Jillie reciprocated only to a degree. Enjoyable to watch them in their interaction.

It looked as though yesterday was meant to be as overcast and dismal as the day before, with unrelenting snow flurries, high winds and freezing rain. No chance afforded us to get out that day, no brief breaks in the weather, no lifting of the winds and the stubborn, ambient darkness. A darkness that permeated the interior of the house which normally lights up in more clement weather, thanks to the many large windows in every room.

In fact, by mid-afternoon the sun took a swift glimpse through the clouds and decided to graciously allow them to continue dominating the skies, at least for the time being. However, rain and snow did relent, eventually, as the temperature rose to a warming 4C, the precipitation becoming drizzle on occasion before reverting once again to full-blown rain.

It was during one of those drizzle episodes that we finally made our break for the outside, rain gear all around. When we descended into the ravine the upper portion of the forest looked quite depleted of foliage, since there are quite a lot of poplars established there. The weather had contributed to the shedding, needless to say. An earlier-than-normal spate of cold, wind and precipitation in all its forms.

But as we forged our way further through the trails and into the heart of the forest the sheer brightness of the fallen foliage against the sullen grey of the atmosphere was itself a study in contrasts, enough to take your breath away. It did ours.

Jackie and Jillie were more than happy to poke their way through the clearing underbrush on the forest floor. There are so many mysterious and exciting fragrances and odours to be investigated and so little time to examine the extravagance of its fall-season presence. Enough to keep them busy and fail to notice that now it's we who are in the lead as they linger, fascinated by all the messages their busy noses pick up.

Now, it's the turn of the beeches to flaunt their colour; it seems they're the last of the deciduous trees to turn and when they do the colour they put out is electrifying in its orange-bronze-gold combination, drawing our eyes to either a single immature beech growing among other trees, or a large copse of fully mature beeches long established along a stretch of the forest trails.

As we stroll along the trails our boots kick up drifts of colourful dry leaves so reminiscent of when we were children and took absolute delight in the piles of fallen leaves inviting us to dive into leaf-strewn hills of fragrant, desiccating foliage much to the annoyance of adults busy raking them up off their grassy lawns.

Yesterday? An utterly dreary (albeit rather rare in that respect) weather day. There was a robust argument up there between the cold, the wind and the moisture in the upper atmosphere; that crowd couldn't agree on what to deliver for the day. So we ended up with alternating snow and freezing rain throughout the day. And since the highest the thermometer nudged up to was 2C, and the forest canopy is much depleted, it didn't seem enticing one bit to haul ourselves out to the ravine for our usual forest trek.

Jackie and Jillie were in agreement. In fact, yesterday wasn't one of their best days. They generally moped about, poor little tots, not feeling at all well. Breakfast? No, thank you. Dinner? They took another pass. So they were, so to speak, feeling 'under the weather'. One of those days. We're convinced they wouldn't come down with these queasy-feeling days if they forbore from eating garbage while we're out with them on the trails. We haven't been able to convince them yet that foraging in the wild is no longer on their agenda as little house dogs accustomed to eating prepared canine fare, both that which we purchase and that which we prepare ourselves.

For me, there was ample to do in the house. Some cleaning, baking, cooking, writing, reading. And I inwardly celebrated that I had, the day before, planted those spring-blooming bulbs, for to do so in this kind of weather is somewhat less than appealing.

And as for my husband, he got around to dealing with the last painting we'd bought, a mid-seventeenth century oil of a young boy and his pet rabbit. It was not in very good shape. Both the canvas and the frame were somewhat the worse for wear. Which accounted in large part for its giveaway price. After thoroughly washing the face of the painting which is to say the entire canvas, and allowing it to dry, a cleaner, brighter painting emerged. It took my husband countless tries to match the colours where tiny tears in the canvas had presented themselves. Mixing hues to finally come out with the correct shade, each a triumph, and there were about twenty of such triumphs.

Now he's reconstructing the somewhat shattered ornamentation on the frame, building it back up to eventually resemble how it looked originally. The painting will eventually be re-varnished and the frame re-painted. And then we will hunt for a suitable place to hang what we feel is a delightful painting, somewhere in the house.

Today's weather? A tad warmer, if 4C can be considered warm, and almost as wet, but no snow, just rain, light at times; sufficiently so that we did get out for a shorter-than-normal turn in the forest. The blazing yellows, oranges and reds fallen from the trees made our trek through the the trails, thick with fallen leaves, a kaleidoscopic adventure dazzling our eyes.

We were pretty close to ecstatic last year at this time when October turned out to be a wonderfully mild, colourful, sunny month, making our trip to the White Mountain National Forest in New Hampshire a resounding success, taking a chance on our part, going a full month later than we usually do, and than we did, in fact, this fall. On our return we began cleaning up the fall garden, tidying up for spring. And we did it, a job that took quite a while, in the comfort of mild temperatures.

Yesterday in contrast, we finally completed that task, cutting back perennials, composting annuals, emptying the garden pots of dirt. Even for a small property like ours, it's become a gigantic task for us, given our dedication to beds and borders everywhere we can conceive of them giving us pleasure. Only this year the execution of the clean-up has been, week after week a few hours at a time, in the throes of tingling-cold and blustery winds.

Yesterday was no exception. We were grateful to leave much of the windy bluster behind when we entered the ravine for our daily walk with Jackie and Jillie. The cold was enough on its own, to warrant dressing especially against the cold, for augmented by stiff winds, its effect was penetrating. And unlike the days preceding it albeit cold, there was prevailing sun -- but not so, yesterday. Still, a walk along forest trails is a treat to the senses whatever the season or the accompanying weather and we all four make the most of those visual and physical treats we're exposed to.

When we returned, I resolved to finally get around to planting the bulbs we'd bought; alliums, tulips and ranunculus; ten in number, twenty and thirty respectively. The wind was emphatically not sympathetic to my enterprise, but ignoring it, I set about using the handy little earth excavator I've had for aeons, to plant bulbs. It extracts a cylinder of soil quite usefully, at a depth just right for inserting bulbs. It takes a firm hand to use it in releasing the soil, but it performs very well.

And so I planted the alliums as a backdrop to the shorter tulips and finally the very short ranunculus went in front. Mostly they were planted in the new garden bed toward the very front of the lawn, though some tulips and ranunculus went elsewhere in other garden beds. I can harbour hope that local squirrels won't mischievously extract too many of the bulbs as they're wont to do, and that come mid-spring we'll be rewarded with some early colour and texture in the garden.

I had been determined to get the job done yesterday, hauling out the solar lamps -- twenty of them in the process -- for storage as well through the winter months, because although we've already been treated to a few days of random light snow flurries, we knew the following days to come were forecasted complete with snow interspersed with freezing rain. This way the bulbs will have the opportunity to establish themselves before the ground frost penetrates in short order, the moisture that descends in the meanwhile will encourage the growth of roots.

Night before last the sky was an astronomer's dream; cold and clear. A dark velvet blue prevailed, with stars and planets shining their glorious heavenly light down upon little old Earth. A bright moon, not the kind of day we would appreciate years ago when we used to enter the ravine for one of our daily walks at night, after the workday was over. For it was when the sky was completely clouded that the nighttime ravine would be illuminated in bright shades of pink or mauve.

It was the light from the inner city glancing off the clouds and returning to the landscape, unseen other than within the confines of the forested ravine, for some strange atmospheric reason familiar to astronomers but not such as we. There was so much light under those conditions, and particularly during the winter months with the added reflective properties of ground-covered snow, that we had perfect perspective, it was so clear to our vision.

That night before last had also the properties that make for cold to penetrate the atmosphere, and we had a good-old-fashioned 'winter's coming!' frost. We know when that happens, not only because the following morning the frost leaves its evidence on roofs, but because trees sensitive to frost like our two little caragenas, the two mulberries and the two magnolias on our relatively small property's gardens react with the kind of shock that impels their foliage to descend en masse.

So we had piles and piles of discarded leaves to rake up. But that was after we'd gone out for our daily ravine walk with Jackie and Jillie, all of us well bundled against the cold. The sun remained out throughout, the wind was light and the temperature rose to 3C. A pleasant walk it most certainly was, as all our such treks through the forest trails tend to be.

There had already been ample fallen leaves on the forest floor, not yet leaving the deciduous trees looking bare, but yesterday afternoon it was clear enough that as much that had descended prior to yesterday was added to in equal measure in one fell atmospheric swoop. And the newfallen foliage is mostly shades of blush and yellow, difficult to capture in photographs, but dazzling to our eyes.

We've a lot of poplars in this forest, and most of the maples turn not red but yellow similar to the poplars, though there are ample crimson-turning maples as well. Birch which also produce yellow leaves, have for the most part already shed their foliage. Oak leaves turn brown, and beech a burnt orange. The willows shed their slender leaves as green as they are in summer. Bass fail to produce colour.

Jackie and Jillie discover all manner of fascinating odours hidden in leafpiles, lingering long over them and snuffling into the piles as though there is some olfactory treasure there they cannot part with without their skilled communication interpretation. Messages, for the most part no doubt of other dogs passing through on their own forays into the forest. As we concluded yesterday's hike, trudging the last uphill clamber to the street we live on, we came across a tall, courtly man we'd never before seen.

He acquainted himself with Jackie and Jillie and when we pulled astern he told us he could hardly believe his eyes and his senses when he first discovered this forest a short while ago, in the midst of the community he has lived in for many years. But now that he had he meant to make the most of his proximity to it on a regular basis. Another nature lover, another pleased and grateful person for whom jaunts in the ravine will enhance the quality of life.

Jackie and Jillie decided, unusually, to remain quite close to us yesterday throughout the length of our circuit through the forest trails. They were subdued in a manner quite foreign to their usual shenanigans. And the reason was that they and we had company on our woodland foray.

Just as we entered the forest to descend into the ravine, an acquaintance drove up with her two dogs and it took her no time at all to catch up to us. She drives over because she lives too great a distance to walk over and in any event now that her son no longer lives with her, she drives over first to pick up his dog, a large black Labrador mix.

Her own dog is a female 11-year-old Portuguese Water Spaniel. Both those dogs tend to emit deep threatening-sounding growls when they come across other dogs. And their demeanour is definitely that of dominating dogs. They rarely pay much attention to one another, though when they're together, as they always are for ravine walks in the woods they often argue with one another and engage in fairly robust physical tussles. The Lab is an alpha female, the spaniel is an unobliging follower.

So when they're around their behaviour tends to alarm Jackie and Jillie. First thing the black Lab does is go into intimidation mode, hovering over and 'nudging' each in turn as they take turns cowering, making themselves submissive to the larger dog's aggressive demand. After which the Lab insouciantly takes off disporting herself happily in the joy of freedom to romp and roam where she will.

At one point we came across another of our ravine walking friends with his three dogs, all of them non-assertive, and comfortable company for Jackie and Jillie to be around, though not on this occasion, when all seven dogs were together, so to speak, five of them suspicious of the intentions of the assertive two with the will to dominate.

Every time the Lab would make for Jackie or Jillie, they responded by trailing my heels and leaping up at me and my husband, to be picked up and given warm haven in our arms. Better we didn't, and we didn't; hoping that ignoring their pleas for protection would give them a clue to the effect their own similar behaviour on occasion affects other dogs who feel just as they do when they're being imposed upon.

It 's quite beyond fanciful of course, but it's as though nature, sensitive to her creatures' dismay with the autumn changes taking place in preparation for winter's introduction, has devised a plan to make us feel somehow better about that transition, with her generous gift of visual pleasure in fall foliage. In the spring there is no need to placate the feelings of sensate creatures.

After all in the spring, though with winter receding,there is anticipation of a felicitous kind. Though the landscape looks ravaged; dark and bleak looking there the exciting advent of new green buds appearing everywhere. In the spring, we feel the excitement of anticipation of the renewal of life. Each passing day brings a new change in the landscape making its way from sere dark greys to emerging emeralds of new life springing out of the soil that has finally shed frost.

But in the fall, there are dreary thoughts of the end of green splendour, and the oncoming cold accompanied by ferocious winds, snowstorms, sleet and inclement conditions we must struggle with. Of course there's the enchanting beauty of winter days, the sun glancing off coverlets of newfallen snow, trees frosted with layers of sparkling ice or cushioned with snow.

The utterly exquisite aesthetic of such landscapes bedazzles and amazes. No matter how often throughout our lives we see those scenes of winter's domination and its capacity to decorate the world we are surprised anew and captivated by the sights. Our pleasure in the natural environment more than balances out our hesitation to praise winter because of atmospheric conditions making us miserable with cold and trepidatious over storms.

Now, when we trundle ourselves through the forest trails, following light-footed Jackie and Jillie we observe the vacating of foliage from their perches on the forest deciduous trees, and the thickness of the colourful carpet of leaves laid down by the wind. We watch as leaves, under the impetus of the breezes spiral and cascade down from branches to ground. We admire the kaleidoscope of confetti-like hues of orange, gold, green and pink with the occasional scarlet creating a brilliant patchwork of nature's devising.

We miss, truth to tell, the daily adventure of recognizing new seasonal vegetation thrusting out of the richness of the forest's leafmass. Their day had come and pleasured us, and now it's gone, for another year. Another year. We can hardly credit that another year has gone by. That we've been through all the seasons that make up a year. But we have.

Just over two years ago we took Jackie and Jillie, then about 8 months old, to Ogdensburg, New York, just across the border, an hour-and-a-half drive from our home, to a veterinary hospital located there to have them neutered using laser technology. We wanted it done that way because it's less painful for them, less bleeding results, it's quicker and recovery is faster.

There were two locations in Ottawa that offered veterinarian laser surgery but their price was quite prohibitive, over $1,000 for each of the siblings. A ravine-hiking friend had informed us that it's more practical and affordable where he takes his own little dogs for veterinarian services, into the U.S. We thought about it, looked online, telephoned the place and made a trip out there for exploratory purposes. Satisfied with what we saw and discussed with the manager there, we made an appointment for neutering for our puppies, returning several weeks later to get it done.

We had made a reservation at a nearby motel where breakfast was served and we relaxed, took a walk in a wooded area alongside the St.Lawrence River to while the time away after we had delivered our confused little puppies to the veterinarian hospital. We visited the Remington museum, we went by a local Walmart for additional bedding for the puppies, and finally were able to pick them up around five to take them home. They had expertly professional treatment, and the cost to us was a fraction of what it would have been at home, about $150 for each surgery.

Scott, our hiking friend, had taken one of his little terriers to the same hospital a year earlier to have a cancerous growth on one of its hips removed; a reasonable procedure there but immensely costly at home. What he paid was yet again a fraction of the cost in Ottawa; a quick surgery, well executed resulting in a cancer-free little dog. We'd had previous experience with the cost of veterinarian surgery with our toy Apricot Poodle when we paid thousands for surgery on three occasions, the last one succeeding not in helping him overcome a sudden-onset medical condition, but taking his little life.

Scott, a fireman by profession, is the most amiable, courteous young man imaginable. We know his mother as well, a more occasional hiker with her own little Shih-Tsu Angus, and Scott, though a burly, handsome young man, and his mother a wee bit of a Scottish woman, inherited so many of his mother's personality characteristics it's quite amazing, including his distinct manner of speech, an absolute masculine version of her own.

He has made arrangements, he told us, to return for the same veterinarian surgeon to once again operate on his little white terrier. Like our little Riley, his terrier has developed a substantial tumour, a fatty-deposit lipoma. We had Riley undergo surgery when his lipomas grew to a size that impeded his gait and turned one of his legs outward. And this is what has happened with Scott's terrier. Its companion is several years younger and has never had any such problems; just a matter of random genetic inheritance.

When the four little dogs meet, as they did yesterday during our afternoon ravine walk through the woods, there's a great racket of yipping and barking and rushing about, in an affectionate display of friendship between four little dogs. That the day was relatively mild at 8C, with occasional sun and a reduced wind effect, made the hike all the more pleasurable for anyone venturing out as we do daily.