Before we set off for today's afternoon ramble through our neighbourhood ravine, my husband removed the sole remaining cleats on my winter boots and replaced it with another, quite similar pair that I have used for the previous five years or so, rather than the pair with the rigid soles that are about twenty years old and not as comfortable to wear. We set off under a heavily clouded sky, and though the temperature hovered just over -5C, a sharp wind and damp atmosphere made it feel much colder.

Most of the snow that had fallen in the past several days has now been whisked by brisk winds off the trees in the ravine, so the forest no longer has that magical winter eye appeal, but when you look from a distance, say a height, over the bottom of the ravine, there's still enough snow embroidering branches to retrieve that enchantment.

When we reached the bottom of the first hill into the ravine, we could see that more dead bees had been tossed out of the wild-bee hive high above, established on one of the largest old pines in the forest. There's been a steady house-cleaning of the hive for months. And every time we have a new snowfall we can see that a new corpus of corpses has been discarded.

As for the creek itself, it's still flush with runoff from the melting snowpack, reflecting the moderated above-freezing temperature of several days back when rain fell non-stop. Yesterday and the day before, the creek was swollen and eddies of swirling meltwater streaming downstream had carried away quite a bit of detritus from the banks of the creek. And then we discovered that we could no longer see the goldfish swimming about the little pool beside one of the bridges; they had been in view for weeks and suddenly they're gone, swept downstream.

Jackie and Jillie are still coping with the indignity of being kept on leash rather than being permitted as per usual to roam about to their little hearts' content.  We're coping, on the other hand, not only with an abysmal loss of their freedom but our own new status as leash-keepers, resulting in often awkward situations when their leashes cross, or when they pull on the leash and we end up hiking at a speed faster than we'd prefer.

Even Max, the Apricot miniature poodle who is usually everywhere at once, is now having to accustom himself to the aggravating necessity of behaving himself and walking on leash because like all other small-dog owners, his human is anxious for his safety given the proliferation of daytime sightings of coyotes and the stories of encounters going the rounds, lately ....

On the good news side, when we came to one of the far-off bridges as we ranged further today than we had yesterday, and I was on the lookout for my lost cleats, there they sat, in a little pile of rubber and sharp metal peaks, placed there by someone who had obviously discovered them where they had fallen off my boot several days before.

And it wasn't until my husband pocketed it for me, and we sauntered on, feeling good about retrieving them, I realized that of the pair I was now wearing, only one remained. Once again, I had lost one of a set. And the funny thing is, when Max approached with his person, she was holding that very cleat aloft, calling out to enquire whether it was one of ours.