Sunday is soup day in this household, and usually it's a blend of dried beans (soaked overnight and ready for cooking the following day) and vegetables. Yesterday's turned out a little different, though. At Jordan's suggestion. He often thinks up meal variations and sometimes when he eats out he has something that sparks his curiosity because there's an exotic touch to it. So what we ended up having was a cream of broccoli soup; different in that it also included smoked salmon. The dish he'd had in Vancouver saw the chef add hot smoked salmon in small chunks to the soup. I had lux, that kind of cold smoked salmon so we decided that would do.

 

I started out by sauteing chopped garlic, onion and jalapeno pepper, together with sliced leeks. When they were soft I added a few herbs, and chopped celery, the chopped broccoli, a chicken bouillon cube and boiling water. It simmered until the vegetables were soft, then out came my trusty immersion blender. About five minutes before we were ready to eat, in went the salmon cut into short strips, and once all cooked, the soup was ladled over thick sour cream. We had focaccia bread (whole-wheat-cumin-cheddar) to mop it up with. Very satisfying.

 

 

Yesterday was, after all, quite a cool day despite that it was also the first day of spring. The temperature struggled up to 2.3C, and refused to climb any higher. Overcast skies gave us light rain, though nowhere near as much as the day before. But today ... today dawned bright and sunny. There was a populist crowd of squirrels on the porch when we came down, vying for peanuts. More than we've ever seen at any one time; black, grey and red. About a dozen at a time, harassing one another, grabbing peanuts, settling into the trees, returning to the porch. A few were busy burying them in the garden.

 

In the afternoon Jackie and Jillie got us all lined up to gear up for the ravine. Sunny it may be, but there was a strong, chill wind. In place of yesterday's rain jackets J&J wore their woolly sweaters and we concentrated on jackets to break the wind and keep us warm. The high for the day was 5C, moderately improved on yesterday's temperature, which affected the snowpack so that the trails weren't quite so icy today.

 

The snow has become completely denaturized; melting, clumping, granulating. The stream, as swollen as it has been for the past three days, has been overwhelmed by the volumes of melting snow running downhill to reach the creek's energetic turbulence. The wind howled through the upper story of the forest canopy, the tree masts swaying back and forth. Occasionally two masts will meet in their dance and the clunks as they do carry down impressively to the understory.

 

For a beautiful afternoon marking the second day of spring, with full sun and a wide blue sky the trails were fairly vacant of hikers. On the upper reaches of the forest, above the ravine, we did come across a number of other hikers with their dogs. And those dogs familiar with the heralding-arrival sound of two little inveterate barkers, follow their sound and scent to confront Irving, the cookie man.

It's surprising, even to us, how many people over the course of the years that we've become acquainted with, along with their dogs. Young women who would come out to hike or run through the woods with their dogs whom we'd see pregnant with expectation, now walking alongside their first babies preparing to enter elementary school, while pushing along a stroller built for rough terrain. If they're little girls, the toddlers always have a lot to say in their possessiveness of a younger sibling...