I woke this morning, when Irving gently put an earbud in place and the glorious strains of Mozart's Ein Kleine Nacht Musik swept through my head. We both love the music of the Renaissance and the Baroque periods. When two of our children played in an orchestra it was mostly the Classical and Romantic periods they performed, but in small groups it was earlier music and we adored hearing them.

After this special treat he whispered since it was so hot why not go out to the ravine before breakfast again? Quietly, so as not to alert Jackie and Jillie, but they intuit it anyway and begin leaping about in anticipation. They can be so easily aroused to enthusiasms and just as readily succumb to behaviours unworthy of them. Like last evening when the smallest of the juvenile bandits came about on the porch and our two coddled puppies remonstrated against the little creature's presence.

So an early morning stroll through the forest it was. To avoid the stress heat brings on really hot days like today when the temperature soars to 32C. We wither in that heat, and you just have to wonder how on Earth people manage to survive heat of 40C and more, similar to what India is currently suffering through.

Unlike yesterday morning with similar heat conditions when we came across no one else, there were quite a few people out today. Among them we saw Denis for the first time in a year, though there are always ample signs of his presence. He's the altruistic community member who has taken it upon himself, though not a dog person himself, to place garbage cans at every entrance off a surrounding street that gives on to the ravine. Weekly he ties up a large plastic bag of waste at each of numerous sites and puts it out for garbage collection.

When we greeted one another this morning, he was replacing old maps of the trail network in Bilberry Creek Ravine forest with new ones he had printed off. He's incredibly conscientious about everything he does and we can only surmise his reward is the satisfaction he derives from his community-minded spiritedness. 

Hard to believe, but it can now be seen that the trilliums are beginning to fade. Their brilliant red is transforming to a soft dusty red, still beautiful, but an indication that their time to shine is drawing to an end. A friend we came across showed us a photograph she had taken yesterday along the Ottawa River Parkway in a kind of glade there with literally thousands of white trilliums crowded together like bright white flags of spring.

After breakfast Irving began to haul out our winter-stored garden pots. They're diminished in number this year; at one time we had so many more but we've given some of them away to neighbours since that time, and we've got so many others, cast-cement-classical urns resembling old stone urns, that we've ample pots to plant annuals in.

I worked in the backyard, cutting back the burning bush because the rabbit had stripped it of most of its bark and we're not sure how much of it can be saved. The weeping mulberry in the back garden also had to be cut back, as well as some of the climbing roses. Bit by bit we're getting everything done.

I even found time to shorten the pant legs of two new pairs of jeans that Irving had bought for himself. We always start out with the ritual of him threading needles for me, but this time I squinted enough to be able to re-thread the sewing needles until the job was completed. Sense of satisfaction there!