Overnight rain again. It's becoming as regular as clockwork. And I hope this doesn't presage a snow-heavy winter. During any winter season this area receives a plenitude of snow. Snow is beautiful. It embellishes an otherwise-drab winter landscape. It sparkles and enchants our eyes when the winter sun illuminates the snowy backdrop to an Ottawa Valley winter. Children love it for its malleable properties, whether to make snowballs to enjoy a good, old-fashioned snowball fight, or to carefully craft a cave (igloo), a tunnel or a snowman.

 

 

Winter sports enthusiasts long for the snow to begin falling, and falling, and falling so they can ski, snowshoe, snowboard or go sledding. The elderly make their reservations to fly south for a month or so,  synchronizing with the songbirds flying south on their annual fall migration. And those who remain at home, not exactly loving winter perhaps, but grimly preparing for it anticipating endless days of shovelling manage to deal with it.

 

 

Environment Canada has issued its seasonal alert, that this will be a  tougher winter than average; colder, prolonged, early and snowier. Perhaps not everywhere throughout Canada's huge geographic territory; it might be confined more or less to the west. We're in the east-central region, but there's no point exhaling a sigh of relief. Ottawa-area winters are never anything to write home about. Even last year and the year before moderate southern-central and Pacific-coast regions of the country encountered colder weather than is their wont.

 

 

We don't spend our days anguishing over the weather, even if it is a major topic of conversation. And we certainly felt ourselves fortunate to get out this afternoon for our daily ravine hike with our two little dogs. A weather-interrupted missed day in the ravine makes the day feel utterly incomplete. Although it looked and it felt as though more rain was imminent to follow the night's inundation, that just didn't happen. 

 

 

I began the day following breakfast with preparing to bake a pear pie. Local pears of all kinds are available at true bargain prices. The choice was either a pear pie or a plum pie, and Irving chose pear.

I thought I'd flavour it with snippets of crystallized ginger, cinnamon and butter once I'd softened up the (Bosc) pears and included a few prune plums for colour, simmering them with sugar, orange juice and cornstarch.

 

I like to put on a chicken soup fairly early in the day so it can bubble quietly away for hours intensifying the flavours of everything in it from chicken to onion, garlic, celery, carrots and parsnips. The aroma of the cooking chicken soup greeted us when we returned from our hike through the ravine. Whetting Jackie and Jillie's appetite for puppy-sized fresh chopped vegetable salads, their usual late afternoon snack.

Not many out on the trails today while we were out. A bit of a moody day. The forest interior dark, though whatever colour there is on the trees is intensified by the perpetual dusk. The air was fairly saturated though the morning mist resembling a light fog had lifted. There was a slight breeze and it carried foliage down from the forest canopy, swirling the leaves through the still, moist air; the very picture of fall. The stream running through the forest has caught quite a cache of gold, tree-discarded foliage sitting on the skin of the creek, bobbing downstream; in bottleneck areas gathering in water-borne heaps of golden flakes.

 

Jackie and Jillie's little legs pump through thick piles of gold-tinted leaves, shuffling them about, disrupting the nice, neat array of discarded fall foliage stopping now and again to sniff a trifle closer to detemine what they've missed on other, earlier opportunities to share canine gossip.