What a beautiful day today is giving us, full sun, temperature soaring to 15C, so surely all this accumulated snow banked up on our lawns and in the ravine will be encouraged to view today as the most unmistakable one yet informing the landscape that spring has arrived. My husband is taking advantage of the day by changing the ice tires on his car to all-weather tires in acknowledgement that another snowstorm like the one that surprised us only four days ago is unlikely to recur.

As for me, it's time to finally launder winter jackets, mittens, toques, scarves, etc. And finish up with cleaning out the kitchen cupboards, making me well on the way to completing spring cleaning. A good enough reason to celebrate. It's been a little hard, though, to tear myself away from the front door actually, so caught up in the fascination of watching the littlest raccoon visitor busy on the porch, manipulating and eating kibble put out for him. He's so accustomed to his entitlement he barely moves off when my husband opens the door to refresh the offerings.

Usually the raccoons don't come around until after four in the afternoon, and then sporadically through the evening and night hours. We know that's when the rabbits come around too, and now that we've seen him, the local skunk - or more for all we know. Three nights ago we knew that a skunk had been annoyed because we could, in the wee hours, detect the odour of its outrage seeping through from what we felt must have been the porch to our bedroom; faint, but unmistakable.

We allow Jackie and Jillie to stand guard at the glassed front door during the day when the squirrels congregate on the porch since they're so accustomed to hearing our two little dogs bark they simply ignore them and get on with stuffing themselves. The raccoons too are anything but intimidated by the leaps at the door and the snarls and growls our two ungenerous little dogs emit in their fury at the presence of other animals on their territory. But at night, once dusk as arrived darkness falls, though we leave the porch light on, we no longer permit them to harass whoever comes around; both rabbits and skunks are easily alarmed and we don't want them disturbed.

During our ravine ramble yesterday afternoon on the still-icy, snowy forest trails where the accumulated snowpack stubbornly insists it'll remain for another month or so, we could actually appreciate that despite the depth of snow and ice packed on the trails and on the forest floor, it is diminishing. Enough remains, however and remains widespread enough to make the atmosphere many degrees colder, the cold more penetrating than it is at street level.

In some areas the trails are still packed with thick, hard ice, in others, depending on sun exposure, the ice has denaturalized to thick slush, while in still others the ice has expanded its widening coverage as the snow over it beings to melt. We can hardly believe that it will still take weeks before the snow recedes enough to resemble anything that looks remotely like spring in the forest. It will most certainly be a while yet before we will see buds on the trees, little welcome bits of colour that inform us that we're heading toward yet another summer when the gardening season can commence...