The virus pandemic has a rival circulating around much of the world. It's called Spring Fever. It took its time to hit, but finally, it did, and it has affected us, quite to the core. To the extent that Irving too has been enrolled in the frantic rush to meet spring's quite exacting standards for preparing to greet the following season. It isn't quite an emergency, we've plenty of time, actually, but there is so much to do ... Intimidating at the very least.

I cleaned the windows a few weeks ago, and since then they've become increasingly murky. Most annoying. I would have got around to having another go at them, but Irving beat me to it. He gathered spray bottle, paper towels, took himself outdoors and cleaned the doors. All of our doors giving access to the out-of-doors are glassed. Now they're also sparkling-clean.

 

He wasn't finished, though. One thing seems to lead to another. It was time, past time, he decided, to clean up and tidy the garage. So out came the vehicles, and a whole lot of other standing items. First off, picking up the newspapers that covered the garage floor. Newspapers? Well, yes. Every fall the car and the truck get the winter-salting oil treatment, to keep them from rusting out. A reflection of the use of road salt during the winter months, on our inhospitable roads and highway systems, slick with ice. The oil drips onto the concrete floor, but the newspapers spread out, catch the oil. No longer needed.

 

That all took several hours out of his day. Matching, more or less, mine. I deep-cleaned the kitchen and bathrooms, laundered linen, and looked after the puppies' needs. When we were all finished, Jackie and Jillie lectured us on our responsibility to them and we agreed. Today has been an exquisitely beautiful day, warm, at 12C, light wind, and a clear, blue sky, sun beaming beneficently down on her creatures.

Most of the trails in the ravine have dried out nicely, but for several areas stubbornly deep in mud. When we return from our forest forays, we hoist Jackie and Jillie onto towels on top of the washer and dryer (the laundry room is also our 'mud room'), and repeatedly sponge-wash indelible-ink-mud off their little paws. This ritual precedes their afternoon after-hike vegetable salad, the most favourite of all their treats.

 

 

Out on the forest trails, they're not entirely oblivious to the mud and do their best to avoid it as much as possible; somewhat like us. For the most part,there's nothing really to see yet in forest undergrowth. Everything remains bare and sere in appearance. Instead of the overall white background we'd been accustomed to for so many months, we now see desiccated foliage breaking down on the forest floor, and areas of revealed Leda clay.

 

The verdance of the evergreens now looks brighter than ever. If we look up, up, higher, straight up we can see at the crowns of maples and poplars with tentative new life appearing. It seems, day by day, to take forever in early spring for vegetation to push through the leaf-mass on the forest floor, and for the deciduous trees to finally begin breaking out their foliage, but in two weeks' time at least, they will.

 

We hear woodpeckers and robins, cardinals and chickadees all expressing their relief that spring has finally arrived. Today, we saw a sole Mourning Cloak, no doubt searching for a mate. For a beautiful Sunday afternoon it seemed to us that we had a monopoly on the forest; few others around. A state that dissipated when we reached the forest periphery at one point, and were greeted by a welcoming party anxious for cookie handouts.

 

We were curious to return to the forest wildflower pollinating meadow, to see whether the Coltsfoot we first saw emerged two days earlier were now more developed. And what greeted our eyes, on the banks of  Bilberry creek was swaths of bright little yellow heads; the Coltsfoot colonizing greater, albeit still-discrete areas of woodland where the sun manages to send its beams of light and warmth through the denuded forest canopy.

 

 

It seems that the wasps -- likely out of the wasp nest we had noted a few days back, since its fairly close to where we were at the meadow -- have also awakened from their long winter-enforced state of suspended animation called hibernation. As I took photographs of the wildlowers, I also saw wasps flying lazily about, and collecting pollen. 

Life emerging and renewing endlessly on the regular cycles of the seasons that nature commands. Along one part of the pathway was a dormant American bittersweet vine, twined around some low=growing shrubbery, still retaining its bright orange-red summer berries.

 

Though we looked again for the presence of the Mallards, the pair seems to have taken themselves elsewhere along the length of the creek, to find a peaceful area where dogs are less likely to fling themselves into the creek as a cooling off treat, and just incidentally swimming after the ducks, disturbing their comfort. We also looked for evidence that the schools of goldfish were still around, but saw none. At a distance they're difficult to spot if they're not outrown their primary state, and are black, not the bright orange we associate with the species, Our son told us Mallards don't normally eat fish, so they're likely still around, just not in eyesight.