I thought I might be hallucinating when I looked out the sliding glass doors of our breakfast room and saw a  hot-air balloon. We haven't seen any in years. They seem to have fallen out of fashion, although there's a yearly hot-air balloon festival over in Quebec. It was cancelled last year, but I doubt the one that hovered over our  houses this morning had anything to do with the hot-air boffins in Quebec. The Ottawa housing market has been really booming this past several months, and ReMax looks as though it might be celebrating, lofting a public relations wave at homeowners below.

I saw the thing dangling from the sky and called Irving to have a look and then left to find my camera for a picture. I returned in about ten seconds and the balloon was no longer there. Irv thought I'd been kidding him. Too cold to be up there in the frigid atmosphere. Could I have been mistaken? Nope, nowhere to be seen. How could a balloon move so fast?

On with my boots, up with my jacket and Jackie and Jillie skittered out the open door alongside me. They had no idea why I was going out and I had no idea why they were, other than they're little camp followers. And there was the balloon, slowly edging its way along the sky, although it looked as though it was suspended and stationary. Its presence had been obscured by the deck canopy which left me puzzled since when I'd seen it first it was nowhere near there.

Then I became aware that Jackie and Jillie were staring up at the sky and barking furiously. What IS that thing we've never seen before? And why is it there to begin with? Friend or foe? Just in case, we'd better bark up a storm to let it know this is not a prospective landing port. Clearly it was the sound of the balloon, the flaring gases that keep it aloft, that alerted them to the presence of something unusual; they don't make a habit of looking up at the sky.

It was soon gone, and so were we. Cold out, but not so much as it has been of late, and no wind, so that was a bonus, along with the graciously beaming sun and that azure ocean of blue. The deck canopy is steadily dripping, the last accumulation of snow from the snowstorm just a few days back fast melting. Just in time to welcome another snow dump tomorrow.

By the time we got around to traipsing over to the ravine the sky had welcomed bouffant white clouds obscuring the sun from time to time. This is an assertive sun at this time of year, boosted higher in the sky by the earth's approach to spring and our tilt. It's closer, relatively speaking, and warmer and more brilliant. I'm sure that the forest is taking heed, trees beginning to feel the accelerated push to spring, belying the forest landscape steeped deep in layers of winter-long-acquired snow layers.

Jackie and Jillie were fine with only their coat, minus their sweaters underneath today. Although we're still stuck in freezing temperatures, the creek has opened, the ice and snow that had obscured its presence mostly melted, water running downstream without its ice-cap.

We're still not seeing squirrels about, nor many birds, though we heard a Pileated woodpecker nearby. They'll all be delighted in another few weeks' time -- say beginning mid-March if we're lucky -- when the snowpack begins seriously melting and they can sense that the sun's warmth has returned for good, at least until next winter.