So yesterday Irving neatly packed all the summer furniture that stood on the deck into the larger of our two garden sheds. It's where he stores winter tires, the snow blower, lawn mower, ladders and the two sets of scaffolding he used to install the upperstory stained glass windows years ago. In fact the scaffolding, meant to stack one on top of the other, came in handy for quite a few jobs bringing him up to the height of about fifteen feet or more. 

He had re-arranged the shed contents to make room for the furniture: two rattan armchairs, a loveseat and a lounge and a glass-topped table, along with the cushions that went with the seating arrangement. Irving had bought the set early this spring, then put it together to replace older similar furniture that had finally outlived their practical use.

There was a time actually, when we used that furniture daily. Despite the new furniture being more comfortable than the old ones, they were scarcely used this summer. We can't have sat out on the deck, using them more than a few days the entire summer. Just too busy. Too engrossed in other things. Which leads me to the conclusion that we work too hard and don't relax enough. We relax when we're reading, when we're online. Otherwise we find things to do or that we think we are required to do.

But now they're all securely stored away for the winter. Not that having done so, our work winterizing the outside is done. Today Irving was out cutting circular 'tops' out of plywood to place over the larger of our garden pots before covering them with plastic. Without the plywood tops, the weight of ice and snow on the plastic kind of defeats the use of it. In previous years Irving had assembled most of the pots under the deck or in a section of the patio at the front of the house and covered them all with a good heavy tarp to preserve them in good shape. No matter how he chooses to safeguard their structural integrity it involves work. We'd have even more of them to deal with if we hadn't given many of them away to some of our neighbours over the past ten years.

And aside from household interior cleaning, I finished scooping the soil out of the pots to trundle it over to the backyard and scatter it along the back fence. Jackie and Jillie were very patient, snuffling about here and there until it got too boring, then following us and taking pains to remind us they're with us and it's time for a ravine hike. A really quite nice day with sun most of the early part of the day and a temperature that nudged all the way up to 14C, and a tolerable wind.

Still, cool enough to put a soup on to cook for dinner, and this time I decided on a pulse mixture of lima beans, split peas, pot barley, lentils and pinto beans. It's a dry mix of peas/beans that don't need overnight pre-soaking. In the soup went chopped garlic cloves, sliced leeks simmered in olive oil, celery, mushrooms, and yam in a beef soup base. I put it on just before we left for the ravine, so it could simmer under a very low heat.

By the time we left for the ravine the sky had welcomed light fluffy white clouds and the sun reappeared from time to time. It felt mild on the street but that soon changed as we delved into the ravine and accessed the forest trails. It felt considerably colder, so it was just as well we had girded ourselves adequately against a day where the absence of afternoon sun made 14C seem somewhat colder in the shadow of the tree canopy, even one as denuded as it now appears.

Dusk enters the forest confines early on these days. With the switch from 'daylight saving' on November 6, we're also heading into even shorter afternoon daytimes, when nightfall begins around 4:30 p.m., a much-hated and no-longer-reasonable switch to take advantage presumably of longer daylight hours by starting earlier in the day. A move said to have originated with the wish to give farming communities more lighted working hours. We've become a largely urbanized society from original agrarian societies.

Modern-day farmers see no need for the continued switches, but until it becomes universally rejected it's destined to continue, irrespective of the disaffection among the public and rumblings from different levels of government toward dropping it from time to time.

By the time we left the ravine this afternoon the sun was fairly low in the horizon and in another hour it would be gone for the day. We have to mentally gird ourselves to the prospect of leaving the ravine on many days when we set out late, when dusk is about to meet up with night-time dark, working up to December 21, the shortest day of the year in our hemisphere. Between the present and another month to come, we'll see some spectacular sunsets of fiery skies presaging the dark shade of night clanging down on us.