What a bliss-inducing day was yesterday! Early-morning sun lit up the house. We barely needed to shrug into light jackets to venture outdoors. Jackie and Jillie are now able to sniff about everywhere in the backyard; the last remaining icy snowbank against the back fence has finally melted. And yesterday's temperature high soared to a longed-for 18C. The wind was a light breeze, and carried with it the unmistakable fragrance of spring.

Birds were busy flitting about in the cedars. Cardinals were pealing their light-and-airy sweet spring melody. Squirrels prowled the back fence, the porch for peanuts and seeds. And my husband decided to clear up the eyesore that our gardens had become over-winter, with winter detritus everywhere. A few days earlier he had taken a broom to the porch and the walkways. Yesterday he took a heavy rake to move some of the disturbed soil where our wonderfully-grassed lawn had been -- entirely disrupted by Bell Canada in re-connecting our service and laying a new fibre-optic cable as they go up and down the street, digging holes, inserting lines -- to fill in the area that had collapsed leaving a large hole.

That led to raking and sweeping the gardens, the driveway, the street at the curb where our spruce trees had dropped a multitude of cones and twigs over winter. It took hours of work as he slowly shed jean jacket, then sweater while warming to the task under the ferocious heat of the glaring sun. Finally done, the pleasure of relaxation on the deck awaited him before I was ready, after cleaning the house, for our daily walk in the woods.

What a difference each day now makes as nature steers her elements toward spring; the trails are being slowly freed from ice, the forest floor from accumulated snowpacks. It's quite surprising how the forest floor and most areas of the trail system, absorb the moisture once the ground has sufficiently thawed, so that mere days after release from frost and ice, large areas are already dry. On the other hand, equally large areas of the forest floor are steeped in extended pools of meltwater.

And offside the trails we can now appreciate the prevalence in certain areas of forest undergrowth, shrubs outstanding for their visual peculiarities. Like the red osier dogwood with its bright red stalks standing out in the overall-drab landscape where plantlife is yet to emerge from the saturated soil, and nor have trees begun to leaf and the impression of dark tree trunks against a grey background lack the nuance of colour, enabling the dogwood to feature itself as a star, where shafts of sun glance off their red-hued stalks bringing colour to an otherwise dreary-in-appearance landscape.

Jackie and Jillie worked themselves up to a boisterous celebration of serendipitous discovery, sensing the imminent appearance of three of their friends, the sibling Border Collies they see so often out on rambles through the ravine trails, and it wasn't long after their frantic barks had alerted us that Barry came along with his three companions.

We're still using their little rubber boots for Jackie and Jillie, forestalling the time when we'll have to routinely scrub their little paws and pads clean of the damp forest dirt clinging stubbornly, resisting multiple applications of warm water to remove the black soil. No problem, Barry tells us, as soon as he returns from his three-times-daily forays into the ravine with his three, they're doused in the backyard with the garden hose.