Today I wore mismatched cleats when we went out for our usual afternoon hike through the forest trails in the ravine with Jackie and Jillie. Irving had scrubbed about and discovered a sole set of cleats. Left from last year when I had 'lost' its companion on the trails and never recovered it. When we returned from our hike yesterday afternoon I realized that one of my cleats had fallen off while we were out. Actually, yesterday -- or it could have been the day before -- Irving, who usually walks a few steps behind me, swooped down twice to retrieve my fallen cleats. 

They tend to slip off without being noticed. They're the rubber kind that stretch over your boots. I'm a small person with small feet and therefore small boots. Most cleats are just too large for me to be held really firmly in place. Added to which the boots I tend to wear have flexible soles. And added to that, trail conditions in the ravine are pretty iffy right now. The product of a 20cm fall of snow accumulation succeeded rapidly by a full day of heavy rain.

Anyone who ventured out onto the trails while the temperature was above freezing, and/or during the rain would have been treading on soft, wet snow that simply gave way underfoot, collapsing to the hard surface below. A flash freeze that followed in the evening and overnight meant all those depressions would be permanent. At least until such time as enough snow would fall subsequently to fill in all those uneven iced-in-solid footprints. 

We try to avoid them as much as possible, but it isn't always possible, which results in wobbling slippery boots that the cleats help with, but don't prevent near ankle-crushes and sideways slippages. Such conditions obviously call for care which also means attention has to be focused on what's ahead to prevent falls. The constant boot slips to either side from slipping and sinking into those frozen depressions works the cleats loose.

There's a hiking etiquette with the expectation that whatever is found lying on a trail should be picked up by whoever comes across it, and hung at eye level on any nearby branches; easily seen and eventually retrieved by the owner. I was hoping, today, that we'd find my errant cleat and restore it to my boot. Irving wears a different kind of cleat set that we bought long ago from Mountain Equipment Co-op. I have an odd pronation at the best of times that has the effect of sliding one of my feet sideways in that type of cleat arrangement and it's beyond annoying, and ultimately leads to the cleat having to be removed and re-set. Or it eventually it falls halfway off and just drags along.

This morning dawned dark. And dark it remained all day. The kind of sky that looks like an aluminum lid locked tight over the world. An indeterminate colour really, that almost matches that of the snow piled on the ground, so that both below and above look silvery-white and the landscape is sandwiched in between. It's also the kind of cloud cover that looks as though it plans to release snow, lots of it. But no additional snow fell today, other than the few centimetres that came down again overnight.

I decided to bake an apple pie this morning. Royal gala apples were on sale at the supermarket this week and we brought home a bag. We don't tend to eat apples as they are, oddly enough, but Irving enjoys baked apples in the winter and apple pie at any season. So, we're having an apple-raisin-cinnamon pie for dessert tonight. Friday night dinner is always special and always predictable: chicken soup and rice, that old Yiddish tradition. And chicken in some form, etc. etc.

By the time I had finished making a bread dough, putting on the chicken soup, baked the apple pie, cleaned the bathrooms, made up our bed while Irving did some light vacuuming, taking the puppies out to the backyard now and again where they challenged one another to a run-about, it was time for a ravine hike, and off we went, Jackie and Jillie zipped snugly into their warm new winter coats and harnesses.

I felt fairly confident we'd come across my cleat hanging from a branch somewhere along the way, but it just didn't happen. No sight of it on the snow-covered ground, either. One of our acquaintances pointing out to us that he'd succumbed to the nuisance of pulling on cleats in deference to avoiding broken limbs, said when I mentioned my missing cleat, that he had seen one hanging from a branch over on one of the other trails. 

Since we hadn't ventured out that way yesterday, I knew that wouldn't be my missing cleat, but one belonging to someone else. Otherwise, we were there to enjoy our usual daily outing, and Jackie and Jillie certainly did. Jackie had been particularly exuberant this past week, racing about back and forth, just delighted to be out. Just as we were and always are, come to think of it...