I often reserve Saturdays for garden work. Because it's a treat, in my opinion, spending time out in the garden. Shorter spurts of time are fine now and again, tidying up the garden, but Saturdays I can devote hours to it, and it's exhilarating. While I was doing that today, one of our neighbours whom I've known for decades walked by with another neighbour's little dog that she's dog-sitting for several weeks, wanting to chat. A half-hour is more than she can spare, she said, working in the garden at any one time before her enthusiasm wanes. How long do I spend doing that? she asked.

 

 

As long as it takes, I responded. Given that ours is a large garden in a small property that needs constant (albeit relatively light) attention. Suzanne never grew much of a garden, but she enjoys ours every time she walks past. She has more than enough to do herself, looking after a house on her own, ever since her husband, quite a bit older than her, died just over year ago.

 

 

Irving was out while I was in the garden, doing some shopping. He had quite a few stops to make. He had seen an advertisement for a waffle iron on sale, and since I've become fairly devoted to making Sunday waffles, we needed a replacement for our hoary old one that had given up the ghost last Sunday.  We also needed more compost bags, because I used the last two -- those giant compostable bags that are collected every week by the municipality -- and we'll need a whole lot more before the garden is put to sleep for winter. He returned just as I was finishing up watering the gardens, garden pots and urns.

 

We'd gone out much earlier to the ravine, on a superb fall day, warm and sunny. Irving had prepared two bags full of various types of doggy cookies for our hike. As the day was so lovely we decided we'd stay out longer than usual and enlarge our circuit through the network of trails in the forest. Jackie and Jillie were all for it. Jillie kept calling her friends over; we'd see no one and suddenly a familiar dog would appear long before his/her human toddled along, eager to say hello and chomp down cookies.

 

On one of the trails we came across a newly fallen tree, not quite across the trail, but partially, and it reminded us that now and again in the past few years we've experienced some quite unusually harsh weather events that had taken their toll of the trees in the ravine and forest. In fact, there are many trees that were uprooted and/or cracked by micro tornadoes, blasting winds and heavy rains and they lie on the forest floor, silent witness to benign nature suddenly becoming ferociously angry.\

 

In the area of the forest where there are a number of old wild apple trees, red ripe or bright green transparent apples hang, just out of reach. Since ripe berries are no longer available any longer to treat Jackie and Jillie with, apples become an alternative, and they're quite agreeable to enjoying the fresh sweet/sour crunch Irving doles out to them.

 

By the time we wound up our tramp through the woods, almost two hours had passed. And we felt we'd been well exercised, all of us. An equal amount of time was spent not long afterward in the garden. It feels so compelling to do all the little tasks the garden invites, that it doesn't seem tiring, the emphasis is on feeling the satisfaction of 'catching up' to the garden's enthusiastic growth spurts.