We got off to an early start with our grocery shopping as usual this morning. Despite which there were more people about shopping in the store than we would have preferred, and the shelves weren't yet adequately stocked. Usually people doing their shopping in this supermarket are restrained and polite, keeping their distance, aware of others and courteous, but we certainly hit the jackpot today encountering uncivil rude people. I don't know how the supermarket staff put up with it.

We're no wiser about the bananas we bought last week, the only young man stocking the vegetables and fruit was unfamiliar to us, and he hadn't heard of anything amiss, though he was anxious to be of help. No question about the bananas today, we had our choice of ripe and ripening bananas to our hearts' content. No more hand-wood-carved bananas for us. In the end, though there were a few items missing because it looked as though some shelves had been swept clear, we had no problem getting everything we set out to acquire for the week.

When we pulled up into our driveway one of the more interesting mysteries in our lives was solved.There was Dan, our next-door neighbour whom we've known for decades, shovel in hand, just finishing up shovelling our walk and porch from yesterday's snow. My husband had been convinced it was Dan to begin with, but I wasn't; he's retired himself, though considerably younger than us, has a bad knee and I had thought it was a neighbour across the street, Melanie, a lot younger and given to snow shovelling at the first hint of snow.

I felt like crying. It's hard to really convey your appreciation for other peoples' thoughtfulness. We're perfectly capable still of doing such things for ourselves. But Dan thought he had seen my husband struggling with the task once and resolved he would do the shovelling himself from this time forward, and wanted us to know that he would be there to help with anything else we needed assistance with. He even told his son Nicholas that when he's out shovelling their own place, to go along and do ours as well. We've been blessed with such good neighbours, Dan among them.

Since this was another 'free' day for me, I decided to bake a small batch of cookies. My husband always loves the simplest cookies his mother used to bake; sugar cookies. I mixed up a batch and added nutmeg this time. Rolled out rounds, and baked sandwich cookies, one thin round atop another with the centre cut out and ladled a dollop of sour cherries between the layers. The fragrance wafting through the house snapped my husband to attention.

It's a pretty mild although overcast day, the temperature soaring to 1C. The trees in the forest are still limned with the snow that fell yesterday and overnight; not much, just enough to make a cheerful statement on the landscape. There were very few strangers about on the trails today which suited us just fine. We did come across quite a number of our old friends, however, and that suited us even better.

There's one woman who lives on a street behind our own, who occasionally brings her two dogs into the forest for hikes, as she did this afternoon. One of the dogs is old, though not elderly, a small furry mop of a dog, with a surprising intelligence and spirit of resourcefulness. The other is barely six months old, a poodle mix, full of energy as only puppies can be. Nemo, the little dog, followed our friend Gary with his three Border Collies up a hill leaving his human and the puppy far behind. We had just descended that hill leading down to the creek.

 Our friend was nonchalant about her little dog off on a tangent. He knows the ravine intimately, and would just go wherever he felt like heading toward. Not the kind of hovering over ours that we're accustomed to. We stood talking with her and another friend for awhile, and then Nemo returned but not to stick around with his human. Instead he accompanied us as we crossed the last bridge and ascended the final hill to take us to street level. Along the way we met up with two of our dearest neighbours.

Nemo calmly carried on, took himself up to the street, then sat and waited. Eventually, as we encountered even more of our neighbours and began a gabfest, Nemo's human arrived with the puppy and Nemo rejoined them and they all made their way up the street, rounding the corner to access their own street, and went home.