Snow descended in fluffy soft flurries yesterday morning. It was fairly mild at zero degrees Centigrade so wet snow was the order of the morning. Hours later, when we drove downtown we found a landscape somewhat different than our own. But that happens, weather can tend at times to be so variable, even at close distances. Our daughter who lives an hour's drive from our home had a thunderstorm with snow resulting. In central Ottawa we found one of those magical crystalline landscapes with every tree and brush limned with fluid crystal under a dark sky.

By the time we got home hours later our own landscape was one of snow having been brushed by some giant artistic hand that had run out of crystal and used the more common winter coverlet of snow. In its own way as mysteriously beautiful in every way for it too catches the light that exists even on a gloomy day of perpetual dusk.

It was late but not too late for an afternoon walk with Jackie and Jillie -- ecstatic at our return home. We hadn't abandoned them after all! Though they have one another for company it seems to them, it appears, little compensation for our absence. So off we went to the ravine to access the forest trails and were soon enveloped in a lovely atmosphere of snow-limned vegetation, on the cusp of twilight. Everywhere we looked gentle mounds of snow predominated creating that wonderful atmosphere of a wintry wonderland that captures the eye and soothes the soul.

We came across no one else throughout our rambles on the trails, so tranquility prevailed; no cause for Jackie and Jillie to become obsessed with the 'unauthorized presence' of any interlopers to offend their sense of landscape (territorial) ownership. As we progressed through the circuit of trails in a large loop of the ravine, dusk progressively intruded on its way to late fall's early nightfall, and as we finally emerged from the ravine, the twinkling lights of a Christmas tree in someone's backyard adjacent the ravine loomed colourfully into sight.