I thought I'd have a problem waiting for laundry day to wash the jeans I was wearing when I fell in the ravine yesterday, capping my right knee, because it had bled and soaked through the right pant leg, so I washed it by hand, and the jeans came clean. I hung them over the laundry room sink and by morning they were almost dry. After the initial few minutes of pain, my knee no longer bothered me, and by the time we finished up our hike yesterday it felt pretty normal. Irving insisted on putting a huge bandage over it. By bedtime I was feeling pretty tsekrochen, but all over my body, not my knee; likely the shock of the fall. By morning I felt good as new.

 

We decided on waffles for breakfast, so out came the waffle iron. And though it took a little longer to prepare breakfast, it was worth the wait. Jillie gobbled up everything, including her waffle-and-sausage treat but Jackie was feeling a little under the weather, and guarded his food, wanting to 'bury' it for later, but wouldn't eat. He made up for it during our afternoon hike, gulping down several cooky treats and his salad on our return home.

 

After we got home from our hike in the forest yesterday late afternoon I put on a broccoli soup for cream-of-broccoli. And with it planned to bake a corn pudding. Not a cornbread, the recipe was for a corn pudding. And it was one of the fussiest preparations I'd ever committed to. One of the two cups of corn kernels was to be slurried, the other cup of intact kernels to be sauteed briefly with the slurry in a half-cup melted butter. There was 2/3 cup of sour cream, 2 eggs in the recipe. The dry ingredients, about a half-cup each of flour and cornmeal augmented with 2 tsp. of baking powder, 1/2 tsp. of baking soda, 1 tbsp. honey and a dash of cayenne powder completed the ingredients. It baked for about a half-hour, rose nicely, was very cake-like. I'd make it differently next time; less butter, shredded sharp cheddar and leave the corn kernels as is. But it was good.

 

Irving spent part of the morning finishing up the electrical work in the glass lantern he installed in the foyer. We use it at night, rather than the chandelier, that sends out too much light; it's an alternative, more muted source of light. He had to figure out how to hang the lantern and how to do the electrical wiring. But it's done, finally. But there's another, smaller one waiting to be hung as well. Acquiring a Tiffany-style stained glass fixture displaced the larger lantern which was hung were the smaller one had been. Now it's the smaller lantern's turn to be hung ... somewhere.

And then out we went to the ravine, on another cold day of steady wind and both sun and cloud, with a 40% chance of rain. We had both rain and frost again last night. Most of the wax begonias in the garden have wilted. It won't take much more for the weeping mulberry to lose all its leaves in one fell swoop-- another few frosty nights will do it.. The ever-blooming begonias still look fresh and beautiful.

 

When we entered the ravine, Irving and I looked at one another. There was a passage cleared of foliage and pine needles in the middle of the trail. Instantly we thought back to last fall when we had come across a middle-aged woman with a rake, actually raking the leaves to either side of the trails. We thought she must be slightly mad. This time, however, I was mad. As in angry. This is a forest. Why anyone in their right mind would haul a rake to the ravine with them to rake up the fallen leaves is beyond ken.

 

Aside from the fact that only a lunatic mind would conceive of volunteering to be nature's housekeeper, the sight of the raked forest floor, after we had been enjoying the vision of an Autumn landscape ablaze with colour seemed like a cruel joke. We passed some people and remarked on how the trail now appeared and they said they had just passed a woman furiously raking the leaves. Eventually we caught up with her.

 

I was aghast at the spectacle of her busy-work re-arranging the natural landscape to suit her vision of what a forest needed; some tidying up commitment on her part, as an act of public virtue. I did not mince my words, and the decibel of my disbelief and critique was rather on the shrill side. From What do you think you're accomplishing? to Why are you doing this? to Haven't you truly anything more useful to commit yourself to? she barely got a word in edgewise. I wasn't listening, anyway. My parting advice to her was to take herself and her rake home, concentrate on her lawn, and leave the forest alone. It's a forest, after all!

 

She had managed to rake a relatively limited portion of our usual circuit, obviously intending to continue on. Presumably to have any real effect, to come out regularly, chastising Mother Nature for her poor housekeeping technique. The moment we passed her, the landscape resumed its natural visage, leaves continue to tumble, increasing the depth of the already-fallen mass beaming beautifully from the forest floor and the trail that Jackie and Jillie were scampering through.

What on Earth gets into people that they conceive of themselves as altruistic, performing good deeds that others will benefit by, when in fact they're fulfilling some kind of subterranean inner need of their own and rationality be damned? Her action was an affront to my own conception of our natural surroundings and the passage of the seasons; disruptive, meaningless and outright senseless.