No sooner does our son living in Vancouver put away his skies for the season, than he plans a camping-kayaking expedition to begin his mountain-and-ocean excursions for the new season. Spring, of course, has arrived in British Columbia. The cherry trees have blossomed as has the large quince tree in our son's backyard. Last week he drove to the Sunshine Coast and took his kayak and camping equipment to South Thormanby Island. The weather was beneficently beautiful, the water becalmed and the landscape unmatched. For a biologist like him, a perfect setting to make the most of.

For us, still in winter's icy realms, we think of spring finally manifesting itself unreservedly, but that time has not yet arrived. We continue to dress for the cold and white greets our eyes on the forest floor as we enter the ravine for our daily communes with the natural world. We know the snowpack is steadily receding, but in most places our eyes light upon it's hard to believe, yet spring melt is in the process. The creek runs freely with churned-up detritus from its clay bottom, receiving meltwater from the hillsides above.

However much we would like to wave winter adieu, it is not possible to look at the landscape without admiration for its cold beauty. Jackie and Jillie spurt about on the trails, anxious not to miss any newly-revealed aromas that tell them much that we cannot even begin to imagine, for as creatures capable of temporarily adapting to this changed environment they are much closer to as a species than we are.

When any of their friends appear, it's an opportunity to socialize and expend physical energy in their usual competitive run-abouts. Everyone tends to be cheerful on such beautiful, sun-lit days illuminating the snowpack, sunbeams glancing brilliantly off the bright green of the flat fir needles and on other evergreens intensifying their deep green colouration.

The sun sits much higher in the heavens now, and its warming rays succeed in comforting exposed flesh, in a kind of contesting of the icy cold emanating from the ice- and snow-pack radiating upward from the forest floor.

Grumble as we may about the tardy entrance of spring and the cantankerous refusal of winter to depart, the landscape scintillates with brilliant beauty reflecting a season loathe to leave, and it's hard not to appreciate it.

Because the environment remains in the grip of late winter, all the more reason to continue cooking comfort foods and dinner called for something different but hot and fragrant with taste-treating ingredients. The night before we'd had a tiny roasted Cornish hen between us, and last night it was a giant stuffed-pizza roll (Panzeroto), one for each of us, stuffed with cheese, mushrooms, bell pepper, tomatoes and smoked mussels.