It seemed sensible to revert once again to early morning walks on the forest trails in the ravine, with the repeated expectation of afternoon high temperatures in the low 30Cs, so that's just what we did yesterday morning. Friday mornings are busy for me, it's when I plan a slightly more elaborate evening meal than usual, and it's also the day that I do a quick vacuuming in preparation for the lazy weekend coming up.

Off we went, the sun beating down on us during the short walk from our house to the ravine entrance. We'd be awhile in the ravine, I knew, because we take our time to make the most of each of these daily excursions. They're peaceful, the forest floor soft underfoot, birds singing, the occasional Damselfly, butterfly or dragonfly flitting past us, even on occasion, beetles careening madly through the lower atmosphere. And the air we breathe there is clean and fresh and cool in comparison to street level.

We're often serenaded by robins and cardinals, and hear the steady thumping of woodpeckers in the near distance, but not yesterday. It was shaping up to be hot, which made us grateful for a prevailing breeze and the occasional cool spot we would come across on some parts of the forest trails.

For the second time in a row of days we encountered the same two large, bumptiously-happy poodle mixes thumping their way through the trails, back and forth; greeting us, then turning back toward the two young women who walk them, Jackie and Jillie yapping at their heels. These large dogs are silent, not a sound is emitted, in sharp contrast to our two puppies' loud, sharp exclamations. The commotion breaks through the serene quality of the landscape until we finally part, each group going its separate way.

On our way we pass parts of the trail adjacent raspberry bushes which have daily for the past week provided Jackie and Jillie with tiny pick-me-up treats. The size of the berries, on the other hand, seem quite appropriate for them, given their own small presence. As soon as my husband stops and begins selecting the ripe-and-ready berries, Jackie and Jillie station themselves beside him, ripe and ready themselves to gobble up the proffered treats.

An infestation of ash borer beetles of the past several years had finally killed many of the ash trees in the ravine. As the trees began their severance with life, tiny offshoots began struggling at the base of the trunks to survive this existential threat. In other instances, trees that had been cut down by municipal works crews in hopes of stabilizing the steady march of destruction, began sprouting new life around their stumps years after they'd been cut.

We marvelled at the determination of growing things to survive despite calamitous circumstances afflicting them. And we wonder how it is that old trunks of trees that have been dead for a decade suddenly sprout seedlings, like an oak close to the trail that last year did just that and this year once again is coddling sprouts in hopes of reproducing, as has done a nearby maple which started the process several years earlier and now is well on its way to preserving the life that was lost.

In today's newspaper there was an ecology article of naturalists in New Jersey, the Sierra Nevada, British Columbia and other areas, studying the phenomenon. Evidently two ecologists in New Zealand have discovered that stumps remain connected in an underground congregation of tree roots where they share water resources. Trees once thought to be dead, all that's left of them a stump, evincing new life because of water circulating through their roots.