I was thinking about the book I'm almost finished reading about Ernest Shackleton's expedition to the Antarctic in 1915. And I was surprised to read that back in those days, over a hundred years ago, processed, 'convenience' foods were being manufactured. Who might have imagined that bouillon cubes were produced so long ago? They were important as a source of robust hot drinks to the men on that ill-fated voyage (which they all survived, amazingly). They had a processed product made of compressed nuts; so much for access to fat and protein. And they had packed with them tons of powdered milk. Imagine!

What brought it to mind was being busy in my kitchen after breakfast, where I'd decided to make a sweet bread dough with egg, milk and honey for a change, though I'm not quite certain what I'll use it for some time in the next few days. Maybe just croissants. And then I turned my attention to baking chocolate-chocolate cupcakes; chocolate cupcakes laced with tiny chocolate chips, frosted with chocolate-cream-cheese icing. And I thought how fortunate we are now to be able to stock our kitchen pantries with all manner of edible products enabling us to produce whatever we feel like putting together for our tables.

Sweet and rich, a real indulgence, the cupcakes but only once weekly do I bake such things (of course there's leftovers that will be used another day) for a mealtime's dessert. And that too brought me back to the Antarctic voyage after the crushing of their ship Endurance in the pack ice, leading to subsistence life on ice floes where seals and penguins and other seabirds were hunted in that vast frozen wasteland to provide for the shipwrecked crew. Month after month after month of seal steaks, using the blubber for cooking fuel, the men dreamed of eating sweets, swearing they would never eat meat again if they survived their ordeal. But in their food stores they had sugar cubes, and each of them was apportioned several cubes daily.

Last night we had the first really hard frost. All our beautiful begonias have been lost, ice-blasted by the cold. Making garden deconstruction inevitable; I just have to make a start of it. Tomorrow, I tell myself. Today we decided we'd go out mid-afternoon with our little dogs for a protracted roaming hike through the woods. We enjoyed some sunshine, with ribbons of bright light combing through the still-intact forest canopy. Frost didn't bother the asters and the compass plants; they're fall vegetation, after all.

There's plenty of green in the overall leaf mass. Those maple, beech, birch and poplar leaves that turned colour weeks ago have now fairly well exhausted their time on high and have tumbled to the forest floor, a kaleidoscope of bright colour. But the bulk of the leaf mass remains bright green for now. Jackie and Jillie sniff about everywhere, picking up secret messages in canine code, as avid to 'read' it all, as we are when we read the newspapers.

There was a small garter snake immersed in the foliage that seemed happy to just lay there, warming itself in the rays of the sun, loathe to move, seeming not to care about our presence. Jackie and Jillie didn't notice its presence, they just trot by, but my husband's sharp eye caught the distinctive bright stripe of the little snake and drew my attention to it. There's lots of snakes in the forest, we just don't get to see them very often.

Spring and fall is when we do glimpse them occasionally, however. And at both seasons they're trying to comfort themselves with a little warmth from the sun; in the spring with memory of the winter cold, and in the fall because they're beginning to experience the onset of winter. The tiny creature's head was clearly toward us; watching us as we watched it.

We've been seeing an awful lot of woolly bear caterpillars, large and small, and all of them sporting wide red middle-stripes. Which, according to country legend, is supposed to signal a mild winter ahead. We wish. Whenever my husband sees one, he gently picks it up and deposits it in a safer area, off the trails where they can get stepped on. In the backyard, he does the same, lifting them away from the pathways.