Yesterday. Finally. Hallelujah!
The sun, after a too-long absence reappeared. The night before the temperature dipped to -2C, with stiff wind but the clouds cleared out and the dark blue-black sky was punctuated with the brilliance of stars. Clouds remained in absence mode through to morning, and there was that glory of Helios's chariot rising to illuminate our day and our landscape!

Discarding raingear we needed only warm jackets, headbands, mittens and off we went. Jackie and Jillie complacent about their woolly coats, soft and comforting. A penetrating wind did its best to remind us of oncoming winter. Remembrance Day is just around the corner. And it seems destined always to make the heavens weep frozen white tears on that day of mourning. Snow, we are informed, will descend mightily two days later.

But when it does it will cover the muck of the incessant rains that have laid thick clay tracks through the trails. Because it was such a glorious day we meandered carefree and mesmerized by what remains of the colourful blanket of leaves on the forest floor, taking our time. Now, the only notable colour left on any trees cling to the beeches, the last to turn and the last to shed their foliage. Some, mostly the saplings, won't surrender their foliage throughout the winter months, jealously retaining them in a gesture of what? modesty ... possessiveness ... ?

There was no rush that we could think of to complete our usual circuit, so we extended it by descending into another part of the ravine, deeper and possessed of a creek tributary where Jackie and Jillie sometimes succumb to an urge to rambunctiously race one another backward and forward on the winding trail.

During times when the forest floor has absorbed a plenitude of rain, we tend not to venture down there knowing the trails will be muck-roiled, but we did yesterday. Only to find precisely what we imagined; slippery, muddy, clay-melted  trails into which Jackie and Jillie's paws squished, sending up splatters of mud to settle on their bellies, while our boots slithered and sank as well into the mud.

Negotiating the several hills that are part of that length of trail calls for caution; we've slid and fallen more than once in the past there, and the end result isn't pretty. No harm done, except when we returned home finally and began the process of clean-up, it took no fewer than ten passes with wet sponges to scrub our puppies' paws, legs and nether regions clear of mud.

It'll be like that, as though they've slogged through a deep well of some tarry, loose substance that indelibly clings to their paws, for the next few weeks at least. The price we pay for the privilege of heading out for calming and beautiful landscapes to round out the pleasure of our every day.