Who doesn't have a leftover-childhood affection for ladybugs? As bugs and beetles go they're attractive with their bright orange, polka-dotted shells. Most children quickly learned that little childhood rhyme: "Ladybug, ladybug, fly away home, your house is on fire and your children will burn" . These ladybugs don't respond, but at this time of year they instinctively head for house interiors. They cling to screens and windows and doors for the opportunity to enter. Irving doesn't care to disturb insects. Last night he showed me one resting in the laundry room on top of the washer. It was still there this morning.

 

They cannot survive winter. Irving hypothesizes that they enter warm places for comfort and to prolong their lives, but they're destined to expire anyway. So this morning he carefully picked the little fellow up and instead of putting it outdoors he took it into the dining room and perched it on the window sheers where it seems perfectly happy. When it dies, then and only then will Irving put it outside. He's like that with creatures we see in the ravine; if they're on the trail he'll help them off it, lest they be crushed underfoot.

 

As adults we know they're useful in the garden. Eating garden pests we'd rather not have munching on our roses like aphids for example. So, it's live and let live with our ladybug population.

 

I'd thought this glorious weather we're basking in would be finished by today, but no, another day of warmth as our due. It had rained at some point overnight, so when we came downstairs for breakfast it was to a wet, warm, overcast morning with gusting winds. Couldn't be more pleasant for working outside. Which was where Irving went directly after breakfast to finish placing wood discs over the garden pots so that the snowpack wouldn't weigh down the plastic he's covered them with for preservation purposes.

 

He had dutifully turned back the clock, and in the process we earned another hour in the day. Which we'll lose in spring, of course. Which also means that we'll have to become accustomed to the day seeming even shorter to us when dusk and then dark fall at 4:30 p.m. now, instead of 5:30 p.m. What a trade-off! We won't be getting up any earlier in the morning to take advantage of earlier daylight, either.

Jackie and Jillie corralled us for an afternoon hike through the ravine at the 'new' time slot. The sun had come out briefly, but then clouds settled back in and it became dark enough to presage rain which had been forecasted. Gusting wind had taken down completely any stray, stubborn foliage that insisted on clinging to their mother-tree. The only pops of colour now appear on immature dogwood.

 

Our all-encompassing green world has retired for the next five or six months. That's how long winter lasts in this northern hemisphere. It's amazing, really, how quickly our eyes become accustomed to recognizing a different landscape altogether, and disconcerting as well to see how far we can peer into the forest and beyond in the absence of the screening foliage . Trails on the perimeter of the ravine meandering directly behind the community now give us views of the backs of houses, entirely dispelling the conceit that we're in the middle of an isolated forest, deep in nature's preserves.

 

 

We can still continue to harbour that illusion, however, when we're in the depths of the ravine, distant from those periphery-buildings, to retain the comfortable fiction of living close to nature, even if we in fact, do so, with however, the interruption of the reality that this is an urban forest. Where anyone can even get lost, losing their bearings on the trails if they're not accustomed to the trails and where they connect and end up.

 

 When we arrived back home I rolled out some bread dough I had pre-prepared and refrigerated to bake crisp croissants sprinkled with sesame seed and filled with grated cheddar cheese as an accompaniment to the simmering lentil-tomato-yam soup I had put on to cook while we were out. It's comfort food for cold days, but will be welcome on any day.