Guaranteed. A year from now we won't remember how disappointing this April has been; too cold, too windy, too wet, too snowy. But if I'm really interested, I could always riffle through to back pages in my diary and see it recorded there. When we lived in Toronto, where we grew, up weather was far more moderate and April was a true rescue from a procrastinating winter. Our middle child was born in April and I can recall in mid-April of the following year she was practising her walking skills on the lawn, dressed only in a light summer frock.

 

 

In April we used to really break out of the winter mold, by driving our three rambunctious children out to Niagara-on-the-Lake, stopping first at Niagara Falls and Queenston Heights for a packed lunch. For a while it became a family tradition until we moved away from Toronto in 1972. We couldn't do that here in the Ottawa Valley where winter really lingers and spring is far too shy to intrude until he finally departs. 

 

Now, however, that it's the last day of April, a chastised spring has fully entered and we're bathing in warm temperatures, full sun and a tamed wind. Irving went out after breakfast to remove all the protective plastic bags he used to cover our garden statuary and urns he had placed on them to preserve their structural integrity rather than allow them to 'age' under the assault of winter winds, sleet/snow, ice and frigid temperatures. Even so, after so many years the 'stone' objects in place for so many years (molded poured concrete) are showing signs of their age. The ornamentation once finely articulated is now weather-worn and less distinct. And here and there cracks are beginning to appear.

 

Jackie and Jillie decided to join Irving in the backyard and so did I. And the glorious feeling of the brilliant sun warming us induced Jillie to sprawl out to soak up the sun, while her brother ranged about here and there, looking for squirrels. And I, I went about the garden peering closely at everything. Some of the peonies are beginning to send up shoots. The green swords of irises are manifesting their renewed presence, and tufts of lily foliage everywhere. Tulip spears are up, but no sign of any interior stems and flowerheads yet.

 

Before long we set off for the ravine. For a change, no sweaters for the puppies and lighter gear for us. As is usual for a Saturday there were few others from the wider community out on the forest trails, Nonetheless from time to time, familiar dogs would converge on us, their humans eventually catching up. There's a year-and-a-half-old Hungarian Vizsla we see on occasion who honoured us with his beautifully proportioned presence; his eyes and his snout the very same burnished-burgundy as his haircoat.

 

We noted that the foliage of trout lilies is now in evidence, but it will be a while before they mature enough so that flowers can be seen; the plant regeneration is yet young. And we were close to incredulous to spot the appearance of the first trillium. Surely, it's too soon?! One single trillium, none others apparent in our view of the area where we generally tend to see them first every spring. These are purple (red) trilliums not the white we're far more familiar with. And we see the occasional Painted Lady trillium every year. It's the effect of the Leda clay soil.

 

There are some areas of the ravine, however, a bit more difficult to access, on the hillsides, where small drifts of white trilliums can be found. They tend to bloom a bit later than the purple variants. I know where to look for them and I'll do just that as time and spring progress.

 

The days of our lives might be wasted in some way if each one didn't present, among other things, a living experience with the opportunity to learn something new every day. Nothing spectacular necessarily, but new insights, the chance to alter an opinion, to explore the world of reason and of nature. There's a little bit of awe in every new thing discovered. Matters that are permanent or transitory, it hardly differs, each new discovery is a bonus.

 

 

In all my kitchen-chemist years, for example, I cannot remember even once using cake and pastry flour in making pastry. Not as in 'pastries' denoting delicate little baked desserts, but rather pastry dough used in baking pies. Cake and pastry flour has always been used in my kitchen to produce light and airy cakes and cupcakes. I use hard-wheat flour for other types of baking, particularly for bread-making.

 

I've used ordinary  hard-wheat, all-purpose flour more latterly interchangeably with unbleached flour. Until I understood by the finished product that I should differentiate in using one or the other depending on what I was baking. I was surprised to find pastry dough firmer and tougher, not at all flaky with the use of unbleached dough. Croissants came out flaky and light with ordinary all-purpose flour, but not with unbleached flour. It is denser and 'harder' than ordinary flour that has been bleached. It even feels different in your hands when you're kneading dough.

 

Today it occurred to me to use cake and pastry flour for the pastry I planned to make to go with a fruit filling. So I did, and it felt as different being kneaded and rolled out, from ordinary flour as the ordinary flour felt from the unbleached flour. Far more delicate, needing greater care in handling. I produced a nectarine-plum pie with it. It baked twice as fast as all-purpose flour pie crust. Its delicate texture browned quicker.

 

I had bought nectarines and plums (both, I think, imported from Spain or the U.S.) Ordinarily smelling and handling fruit will tell you of it's ripe. That's no longer possible. For one thing, they're packed in transparent plastic clamshells, so you can see them, but can't touch or smell them. These days, with greater distancing and care because of COVID transmission one mustn't dare open those lids to handle the fruit, much less sniff it.

 

Sometimes these purchases turn out fine; the fruit at the peak of ripeness. Sometimes they're over-ripe, sometimes they're tough and hard, a long way to ripeness and they won't ripen off the vine or the tree. Although growers and shippers plan for perfect timing from orchard to point of sale, that no longer applies with the deliveries chaos resulting from the pandemic. That was what happened with the nectarines and the plums. So I had little option but to use them in fruit compotes, or today as filling for a fruit pie. Stone-hard, they had to be processed before going into the pie shells. Which meant simmering gently until soft, in a mixture of sugar, cornstarch and water.

 

The finished product looks fine, but it's how it all ends up tasting that's important. And we'll find that out later in the day. And this has been a beautiful weather-day. Still cool, but relatively so, at 12C. Light wind in comparison to the brisk, icy wind we've been experiencing of late. But the sun was full out, lighting our world and warming our house. Once I'd done the pie, put on a chicken soup to simmer for dinner, and pre-prepared a small yeast-raised dough to refrigerate until I plan to use it (probably, since it's a simple, plain dough, for pizza later in the week), we thought we'd better take an earlier advantage of the day than usual.

 

Jackie and Jillie agreed and off we went for a leisurely hike through the ravine.  Lots of birds about; hairy woodpeckers, cardinals, song sparrows, but no sign of the owl today. Amazingly, there was a distinct acceleration discernible in deciduous trees' and shrubs' beginning output of foliage from the day before. There's nothing quite like April rain and sun to spur that regenerative process. Even the occasional blip like the snow we had a few days back doesn't interrupt nature's blueprint.

 

The forest floor is beginning to host all manner of new growth, from tiny emerging strawberry plants, to the first glimpses of trout lilies and woodland violets forging through the leaf mass along with ferns and flowering Coltsfoot. The first sighting occurred today of Foamflower, a woodland plant with a close resemblance to cultivated garden Heuchera.

 

Finally, the trails are beginning to dry up, inviting us to take longer and more variant trail networks in our stride. When we do that, access trails we don't normally use in our circuits, Jackie becomes really enthused and picks up his pace, his curiosity and sense of adventure piqued. As it was today, when we ventured to another portion of the ravine we often bypass because it's so low-lying and tends to remain  muddy for longer than the trails at a higher elevation. 

 

There, at an offshoot of the main creek running through the ravine, we saw dirty remainders of our winter snowpack, not yet melted. Shelves of ice remaining, posed alongside and over the rivulet, too stubborn to melt just yet in areas that see little sun. There are so many micro climates in the forested ravine, one area can be colder, or alternately warmer than another. And similarly, host different types of vegetation. All of which expose us to a multitude of different little discoveries.

Once, while Irving was in China on a mission for several weeks, income tax season loomed and time was getting short. I thought what a pleasant surprise it would be for him on return to find he didn't have to apply himself to doing the returns, because I had already done them. So I sat down fully intending to polish them off and we could forget about the deadline. It seemed easy. At first. And then I got bogged down. Not once, but repeatedly. As I shoved the paperwork away finally, it occurred to me that the returns could, after all, await his return.

 

 

Now, all these years later, none of our friends and acquaintances do their own returns. They're shopped out to tax specialists. And people think nothing of having their returns done professionally for them. Not my husband. At one point, years ago, he could save the drafts he composed before doing a final copy from the year before and use it as a guide. That's no longer possible; every section of the return year after year undergoes changes.

 

 

With a population having different degrees of numeracy and literacy, you'd think the geniuses at Canada's Revenue Agency would have planned out a simple framework for people to fill out their returns readily and accessibly. The direct opposite has occurred; each year the returns are more complex and more difficult to complete. Little wonder private agencies do such a booming business at tax time.

 

 

Irving started the process late; the usual procrastination; there's always more important things to do, and he'd get around to it -- eventually. Well, eventually saw him sit down with all the paperwork and go at his return first, and then mine. We split our incomes as it were, since mine is a pittance and his is the more generous, so there's that little complication. But this morning he completed both, and took them off to a postal station and sent them off to Revenue Canada; good riddance.

 

 

While he was at it, he loaded up the car with bags that I had prepared to take over to the Salvation Army Thrift Shop. Spring cleaning wouldn't be complete without going through cupboards and making them a little leaner. Haven't worn this in ages, in it goes. Doesn't fit any longer, that too. I should have packed up baking dishes and other things in the kitchen to send over as well, but just didn't feel like it. I have a special attachment to kitchen things and tend to retain them long after I find there's no more room to store them.

 

Eventually we did get around to tagging after Jackie and Jillie in the ravine. A beautiful, bright blue sky and beaming sun, compensating for blustery wind gusts on a cool spring afternoon. We peer here and there; above at the forest canopy where we can see bright red clusters on the crowns of tall old poplars and maples. Soon, little green shoots of foliage will begin to appear. They began doing just that on the branches of the forest understory and though we've seen this same spring phenomenon for 85 years it never fails to grip us with amazed wonder.

 

Robins are happy that the forest floor is finally giving up its earthworms. On the past rainy days they've been trilling their little hearts out with expectation and happiness. They're now starting to scrub about in the underbrush, while woodpeckers are busy up above. Crows are more in evidence now, and cardinals have been celebrating the change in seasons as well, with their incomparably exquisite spring melody.

 

We crooked our necks this way and that fixing our eyes on the distant owl's nest in the crook of an old pine's past injury when it lost a limb and gained a generous nesting space. It's deeply recessed and it's not possible at that height and distance to see anything. But there was the male owl, seated on the branch of a nearby tree but too distant for me to capture his image. A friend told us he had heard the male and female with their distinct gendered voices calling to one another. He feels the female is sitting on eggs that haven't yet hatched, and not that she's there looking after owlets yer.

Past experience with weather surprises always whispers to us not to believe it when spring arrives, because winter is never quite prepared to make a clean break, ushering in spring and dutifully departing.  Invariably, the break between the two seasons, albeit gradual, is never quite that dependable. Not as long as winter feels unappreciated after working so hard for months to please us. If we're going to be that ungrateful, he roars, I'M NOT LEAVING!

 

Winter teases us, seems to withdraw, allowing spring to tentatively bring in some warmer temperatures, exchanging snow for rain, allowing the sun greater opportunities to shine, but he's got that gleam in his eye: Leave? Why should I? Who's going to MAKE me? Well, nature of course. But there are occasions when she's so busy elsewhere attending to so many other august supreme duties, season-changes slips her notice.

 

And really, winter's right. Who IS going to challenge his curmudgeonly presence when he should long ago have gracefully departed. We appreciated his presence when it was seasonal. Clearly, it no longer is. So when we awoke this morning, to view a winter sight colouring the atmosphere in white, we were not only nonplussed but somewhat incredulous. What did we do to deserve this?!

 

And for heaven's sake, as though to comfort the world, when the snow did stop being hurled about by an icy wind before noon arrived, the sun made its brilliant appearance. Oh, not for long, just long enough to deliver a smile to our faces. The sun, in fact had an appointment with the sky for this afternoon. We thought that when we did get around to being ushered through the ravine's trails by Jackie and Jillie, it would be in sunshine. To mitigate the cold and the wind.

 

The sun too, is a mischievous element of nature's great environmental clockwork. We awaited its permanent arrival to illuminate the day, then finally set out for our daily tramp through the woods because Jackie and Jillie were convinced it was time, time time! And throughout our lengthy hike, not a sign of its return. Until we arrived back home, when it emerged apologetically for having let time get away with its promise. Better late than never, the sun chided us for laughing.

 

Jackie and Jillie had plenty of company now and again through their peregrinations. One fellow joked: here comes the food truck! as Irving dispensed cookies to an expectant crowd of salivating dogs. Irving is impressed when mostly large dogs control their urges to snap up cookies, and instead politely and gently wait until one comes their way, then softly take possession, like a caress of gratitude.

 

One of our friends took us to a spot on one of the major trails where we looked down on an old pine that had lost one of its leaders. There, where the limb had been was a sizeable hollow. And in that hollow an owl's nest. And in the nest, newly-hatched owlets. Irving, who recognizes the songs and sounds of a good many different types of birds, had heard an unusual sound the last few days as we crossed the first bridge over the creek and made our way up to the ridge above where a main trail lies.

 

He wasn't able to identify it, not a song, not a call, but reminiscent of a young bird calling to be fed. And perhaps that sound emanated from that nest. In the next few weeks we may see and hear greater evidence of the presence of nesting birds and their offspring. This tree happened to be located in close proximity to another tree that had once hosted the nest of Great Barred owls. Back then, there was a tree leaning far over the creek, and a mature owl would often sit on a branch with a juvenile owl.

In the flurry of activity when we return home from our weekly shopping expedition at the supermarket Jackie and Jillie are beside themselves with relief. Abandoned, but then the prodigals returned. And to make amends were generous in handing out treats. As in cauliflower florets and 'bacon' strips for doggies. Feelings sufficiently mollified, they watched the usual routine of unpacking groceries and putting them away where they belong. 

 A lot of groceries. Fruits, vegetables, the only foodstuffs two little dogs are interested in. Eventually everything gets tidied away, we all troop upstairs and the puppies lounge about on the bed, while we take our morning showers. A little late, true, but a restorative in this case. After which Jackie and Jillie obligingly eat their breakfast, and we ours. They had little bits of cantaloupe cut into their kibble, along with small cheese dice and chicken strips. Actually part of a breast of the Cornish game hen we had for dinner last night.

That was capped off by sharing a hard-boiled egg between them, chopped into little pieces. And then and only then were they satiated and prepared to take a long post-breakfast snooze. When I went out to the backyard with them later, there was bright blue little flowerheads of scilla in the garden, calling out to be noticed. In our garden they're the second bulbs to flower early in spring. Tulips are coming up but they're much slower and later to flower, and the daffodils as well.

The dwarf irises are already in bloom, have been for awhile, and next off will be the grape hyacinths. So although the garden looks pretty 'empty' its denizens are recovering their good humour as they emerge from winter's long sleep. It's how I felt this morning, just a little unprepared to meet the day, getting up earlier than usual to do the shopping before the supermarket gathered a crowd.

Irving got a call from Greg, the garrulous mechanic who works for the RCMP to keep their fleet in order, and who so kindly also does house visits on the side. We had seen him doing Mohindar's vehicles a few weeks ago and that reminded us ours too needed to have their winter ice tires removed and summer replacement put in place. He'd called when I had finished up the last of the kitchen cupboards in my spring-cleaning chaos, and Irving had completed his tax return. Mine to follow.

We were ready to embark on a ravine tramp with the puppies, and told Greg the vehicles would be moved from the garage to the driveway and the garage doors left open for him. And then off we went. By the time we returned later, he had arrived and had completed one of the vehicles. Irving stayed outside talking with him; they're both men who enjoy discussing any topic at all. 

In the ravine, there were the first tiny green shoots being extruded on the branches of a small privet sapling, the first we've seen developing. And the hazelnut shrubs are hanging out their catkins, just as our Corkscrew Hazel in the backyard is doing. 

Last night's heavy rain churned up some of the trails in the ravine and made evading the worst of the areas advisable. A cool, windy day, heavily overcast, with dark streaked clouds, but no more rain. The atmosphere felt freshly scrubbed, the air light and cool, drawn gratefully into our thirsty lungs. The odour that pervaded yesterday, of freshly manured arable land was absent today, courtesy of the rain.

We met up with no end of dogs out enjoying the day with their people. There's an ever-widening circle of dogs who make a beeline for Irving, now. Before we leave for our tramp through the forest he always checks his portable store of doggy biscuits to make certain he has enough to be prepared for the demand. By the time we complete our hike through the ravine, the store is usually depleted, so if we come across any of the same dogs again, Irving patiently explains to them: 'Sorry, no more left. 'Till next time!' 

 

 

He arrives fairly punctually at five in the late afternoon every day. Usually Irving anticipates him and makes certain there's lots on the porch floor for him to choose from. On the rare occasion if he forgets

to put out some biscuits alongside the peanuts, as soon as Irving spots Fatty Rascoon on the porch spooning up peanuts in his clever little hands, he opens the front door to the porch and offers some biscuits. Or, if there's leftover French toast or pancakes cut up, that will do.

 

If we don't notice, he'll sit waiting expectantly on the porch. How does he know it's 5:00 pm and time for him to mosey over from the ravine? Hunger pangs? Something triggers him to hurry over in broad daylight to amble up from the ravine and then to go through someone's backyard, cross the street and make his way up to our house. The thought of special treats is his navigator, what's his clock?

 

 

But he's only an animal, after all. Animals don't think, they don't perceive and draw conclusions. Only humans do. That's why, evidently, he will turn his attention to the glass-front door and try to gain our attention. He knows, clever little creature, that it isn't coincidental that his arrival will result in peanuts/biscuits mysteriously appearing. If the provisions are due to nature carelessly scattering them on our porch for his pleasure, why doesn't nature do the same thing in the ravine and spare him the trip?

 

 

He's made the connection. Just as Jackie and Jillie, when six o'clock ticks around, come and visit me, their eyes pleading for dinner. If that doesn't work, a few short, quick barks will.  Fatty Rascoon knows Irving puts out his treats. When Irving opens the door, Fatty edges back just slightly, watches as his treats are deposited and moves quickly back into place to claim them as Irving shuts the door.

 

 

We rarely see him and his pals while we're out in the ravine. At one time, many years ago, we would often come across Fatty, or one of his predecessors. We would also often enough see pheasant and grouse and foxes. The pheasant and grouse are gone, and it's a rare occasion when a fox is seen. The urban environment is inexorably forcing out the wildlife, closing off corridors for their passage, changing and taking over their habitat.

 

 

Now, we visit them frequently, and they return the compliment. We're comfortable in their terrain, and they find it awkward and potentially dangerous in ours. No fear that housing will be installed in the ravine. The geology just doesn't lend itself to construction. Too much nature to tame. Which is just as well, since city dwellers, though they don't quite know it, need the opportunity to get closer to nature on a regular basis. It enhances our lives to do so, creates serenity and pleasure, gives us leisure opportunities, refreshes our outlook on life.

 

All to the detriment of the wildlife that inhabit the forest and make themselves scarce when humans are around. Animals that find themselves squeezed out of their natural surroundings. Because nature created species with different needs and values in opposition to one another. And the alpha creation feels entitled to its entitlements.