Just as well that people tend to be motivated by habit and the comfort that habit brings as much as they are by other, less mundane, more emotionally explicable urges such as curiosity. Our routine forays into the ravine to delve into its forest, walking the trails alongside, past and over the creek running through it, might be far less attractive a prospect if we failed to come across interesting observations on such a continual basis.

So it is our curiosity and the pleasure we take from being part of the natural world as it reveals itself to us while we're in a forest setting, equally as much as that it is a habit that we both share, my husband and I, since we were children together, seeking out green spaces while living in a largely urban environment.

We imparted that preference to our children, since from the time they were able to note the world around them until they were young adults they accompanied us on our many and varied excursions into the natural world landscape that has always been a lure and accessible to us. I can dimly recall as a very young child always yearning to be in a park, to see grass and trees and birds and butterflies. My husband was able to see far more of Ontario's green countryside than me, occasionally accompanying his father to area farms for business.

Our shared love of the out-of-doors wasn't what brought us together and isn't what has kept us together but it certainly has gone a long way to informing, entertaining and pleasing us together. Since I can remember, my husband has had a kind of wanderlust, wanting to go places, see things, explore. And that urge kept us doing just that.

So now that all that is behind us, it's still with us, and confronts us for the future; we will never tire of the natural world around us and the privilege of visiting it as a daily break from our urban, settled lifestyle. Jackie and Jillie agree; they too share our pleasure in our daily hikes together through the woods. Our close proximity to the forest trails has been a huge bonus to us, meaning that we can just leave the house and stroll up the street to access the forest trails.

When we were raising our children in another house located not too far from our current one, a similar situation prevailed where we could strap on snowshoes or skis in the winter and make our way through linked greenspace trails to woodland and open fields and where in the summer we could access trails to walk through a much smaller forest but offering wildflowers just as the more extensive one we now live beside does. When our daughter was in her late teens she would dig up wildflowers and plant them in the garden.

After our ramble through the woods yesterday, a bright sunny morning with a cooling breeze, we saw asters, goldenrod, and apples fully ripened, some a considerable size, given that they're feral apples. At home afterward we mused as we walked around the garden, that it has taken so long for one of our pink hydrangeas to finally begin blooming, and then sparsely; the other shows no sign at all of blooming, while the pure white Annabelle hydrangeas bloom ceaselessly.

The panicled hydrangea, on the other hand, has grown into a giant shrub. Its floral offerings beloved of bees that look like hefty football players, if bees played football on the odd occasion when they're not busy picking up pollen on their busy feet.