It surprises us sometimes when we realize how many people we've met over the years hiking through the ravine trails. Many of those people whom we met 30, 20 years ago are no longer to be seen. But we recall and remember them. Many still circumnavigate the trails, just as we continue to. From time to time one of our acquaintances will inform us what had happened to people we once knew. Sometimes people no longer frequent the ravine once their companion canines are lost to time. Or they fall victim to a chronic health condition. Or they move away somewhere else. There have even been occasions when someone has posted an explanation of their absence on one of the forest trees.

Now and again we'll suddenly recall that it's been a while since we last saw a certain person, and then unaccountably they show up. There's usually a reason for their absence, but not always. We're always surprised when someone we haven't seen in a while turns up, and conversations resume as though there never was an absence. 

This afternoon we came across someone we knew years ago walking with a young woman and two very small children. We knew him when his two boys were in their early teens. The pre-schoolers we saw with him today were the children of one of those teens. It's bemusing on occasion to consider how swiftly time seems to pass. We become older and usually mellower. 

It seems obvious enough now, not just by the calendar, since it's the last day of February 2021, but by prevaricating weather patterns that spring is champing at the bit, just as we are to see its arrival. The series of snowstorms that barged into the landscape the past several weeks served to remind us that winter isn't yet done with us, but there's nothing new about that.

Today's temperature soared to 2C, balmy, a beautiful sunny winter day. Yet the forecast warned that rain is on the way; by late afternoon/early evening, chance of a thunderstorm and rain to follow. Milder temperatures bringing rain, not snow, will begin to make some headway on melting our winter snowpack. There's lots to melt, but it's just as it appears every year at this time.

In the dim interior of the forest the sun glows above the forest canopy and just on occasion throws its beams of light slanting through any gaps in the trees. Still, we look up to the canopy and see a wide, blue sky. And then there's an entrance of silvery-white clouds and before we know it there are no more slanting lightbeams illuminating patches of snow on the forest trails; from sun at the time we entered the ravine, to full cloud cover and incipient rain by the time we complete our afternoon circuit.

I had been looking for the miniature snowman that we tend to see at least once in he winter after a snowstorm, appearing on a corner of one of the ravine bridges fording the creek. Up to the present the snow man hadn't appeared. But today, there he was, perched on the corner of the bridge railing, surveying his kingdom. Whoever it is that invites the little fellow to reveal his presence every winter, assuredly it's someone with a good sense of fey humour.

And you wonder, does that person extend the invitation to widen the acquaintanceship of a shy little snowman out of the goodness of his/her heart, or because he/she anticipates squeezing a smile of appreciation from anyone passing by, content to remain the mysterious presence who befriended a lonely little snowman?