In those brief and barely-awake moments when you wake during the night to hear the murmuring of rain outside, knowing the garden is being watered and you won't have to do it, and you turn over and blissfully return to sleep, there's a comfortable coziness about it all. And then you waken in the morning, know it's time to get up to meet the day and it's still raining. Heavily. There go your plans for an early-morning traipse through the forest trails.

It's not merely habit at play here, the regret you feel. But the walk through forest trails, you console yourself, has only been delayed. There will be an opportunity at some time during the day to break free of your comfort zone snugly housed when you can go out. The day wears on and the rain events just keep up, their regular rhythm, the dusky atmosphere accompanying the rain, the closed-in feeling originally so comfortable, feels confining.

When afternoon arrives you feel restless. And a bit guilty as Jackie and Jillie evince puzzlement that they haven't yet been able to course through the forest trails as usual. Like you, they miss the feeling of freedom that being in the out-of-doors conveys to your senses. They may or may not miss, as you do, the outdoor atmosphere, the clean air, the smells and sounds and little distractions that invariably make your tramp through the woods more fascinating.

And just when you begin to believe that this day there will be no break in the rain, there suddenly is. With rain still dripping from all outdoor surfaces, off you go into a cool, damp day, the temperature stuck at 14C. But you're prepared, all of you wearing raincoats and happy to be out. Unsurprising that no one else is. And that there are no encounters today with others; your two little puppies are the only rain-event trailblazers to brave the elements today.

There are large rain puddles here and there on the forest floor and centered on the trails; easily bypassed and Jackie and Jillie too choose not to enter the puddles and disturb the perfect mirror image of the surrounding forest reflected in them. Most late summers copious rain is quickly subsumed into the dry soil but not this summer of constant rain where the forest floor has been drenched time and again, and the usual dry cracks that appear on a summer-dry landscape never materialized.

The creek is wide and high with runoff and muddy as well. It carries downstream all manner of detritus, from fallen leafy twigs to dead branches and the rude leavings of careless people, discarded bits and pieces of packaging, plastics, drink containers. But not much of the latter, unlike what we've seen elsewhere on occasion. Any amount of such trash is an assault on our environment. What we do see is a logjam of mostly natural castoffs, leaving the appearance of the messy home of an indifferent housekeeper.

 We see more mushrooms emerging here and there. And muse on the fact that this year the mushrooms are different than those we would see decades ago. We no longer see Indian pipe, nor endlessly ridged architectural fungi, nor the ghastly pale blue ones that always reminded me of corpses. And nor do we see the patches of bright orange toadstools, large and well formed that we once saw; even purple-hued mushrooms. Those we saw today were bowl-shaped, large, ivory-coloured and despite their size, porcelain-exquisite.

At one point we suddenly noticed heaps of wood shards around the base of an old poplar. In the dim light prevailing in the forest on such days, shades of white have a way of suddenly leaping to your attention; the dimness of the light seeming to play up the light colour, making it more obvious. It was clear that a very industrious Pileated woodpecker had been at work. It was the sheer over-abundance of the chipped wood off the trunk of the dead tree that was surprising. Reminiscent of a carpenter's busy workshop, its floor steeped in fibrous cast-offs.

There were a few drizzles; at times hard to say whether drips from the forest canopy or start-up rain.   We did, though, make it through a shortened circuit this afternoon without a major rainfall marring our hike. And when we returned home and looked about the garden, there were new, huge and bright blossoms opening on the Hibiscus shrub. The various types of begonias we planted this year all look beautifully lacquered from the rain. Indeed, no need to water the garden pots today.

A roundabout of the garden is always called for. It's always a treat to see how  overcast conditions and rain transform the colours, affect the stance of the flowering plants weighted down by water. We enjoy a double treat of almost equal value; our traipse through the forest revealing under variant conditions little landscapes we may not have noticed before. And the stroll along the garden pathways with their bright pops of colour and form delight us in exposure to others of nature's very special attributes we are permitted to temporarily share.