Perhaps it's not Nature after all, who teases us. What if it were really that her season of Spring is itself so shy and retiring she hesitates to assert herself in trepidation of the very real possibility that should she enter too soon, Winter will be so aggrieved as to never speak to her again. Some of these seasons, after all, act like prima donnas. We do attribute to Winter grumpy recalcitrance, a bad-tempered unwillingness to leave when his time is up, to move over and make room for the following season that everyone on Earth is so anxious to welcome.

Winter is a resentful, nasty old man.

Spring, a slender, beautiful sprite, on the other hand, is gracious in her generosity, awakening all the elements we so love that Winter's windy cold has sent into temporary suspension, so akin to death itself. The tenderness of Spring is such that she is fully reluctant to cause an old man any further resentment, and so she is careful to await such time as he has succeeded in tiring even himself by his unwanted presence, and finally departs, taking with him his elements that have outlived their time, and we bid farewell to Winter, to ice storms, snowfalls, and extremely cold temperatures.

That time appears to have finally arrived, now that we're halfway through April. Yesterday's temperature bustled up to an incredible 18 degrees Celsius under a wide, blue sky that the sun smiled broadly down upon us from. We were able to free ourselves from jackets and toques, gloves and boots. Oops, scratch the boots; there was still enough snow and ice on the trails, still slippery enough for slides and falls to convince us the boots were still required, reluctantly complete with cleats.

Mourning Cloak

We weren't the only ones out and about in the forest. We came across a very busy Pileated woodpecker and though I tried to snap him in the process of debauching a tree, he was too clever by half, moving to the opposite, unseen side of the tree just as I prepared my camera. We saw, too, small orange butterflies which, if I remember correctly, may be called commas. And also present were the larger, early spring Mourning Cloaks, the sun throwing their shadows as they flitted through the trees.

If anyone has an interest in world affairs and the way that politics and organizations set up to reflect a world vision of conflict-prevention with a view to aiding the inevitable flow of refugees that result from such seemingly unavoidable conflicts providing humanitarian aid around the world, there is nothing quite as instructive as reading the opinions of those who were actually on the scene in some of those dramatically obscene conflict situations.

I've only now got around to reading General Rick Hillier's (former Canadian Chief of Defence Staff' 2005--2008) memoirs, A Soldier First -- Bullets, Bureaucrats and the Politics of War, published in 2009. His story is an interesting one, from his boyhood to his maturity as a responsible, intelligent, humanely capable manager of the Canadian Defence Forces.

His impressions, above all, of the United Nations and its sadly dysfunctional role in overseeing the order of a fractious, bellicose, combative world simply serves to validate an overall public perception of that ambitiously-failed world body as an inept, corrupt, crony-ridden, Third-World vehicle by which political-religious-social blocs have been able to capture and manipulate the administration of its various arms to their very particular vision of their place in the international community and their complaints over past injustices while they are themselves complicit in current injustices.

Some of General Hillier's observations strike the message of a compliant-to-pressure, hopelessly befuddled and incapable United Nations and they're worth noting:

"The Srebrenica Massacre had left us with enormous numbers of refugees to deal with, tens of thousands of the homeless during a viciously hot summer. I went to Tuzla and landed by helicopter at the airstrip just outside the UN sector headquarters on a hot afternoon, with temperatures hitting 40 degrees Celsius. There must have been 35,000 refugees on the runway, most of them old men and women and some very young children, but almost nobody in between. They were on that runway in the hot sun with precious little water, almost no food and no shelter. Almost all were in deplorable condition because of the traumatic and severe hardships they had faced during the attack and afterwards, when they were forced to make their way into Muslim-controlled territory, over hills and through forests, on foot. That tarmac had now become their home."
"The United Nations, representing the will of the international community, had failed. The UN just couldn't handle that many refugees and was incapable of looking after them, let alone helping them recover and get on with their lives. By then we were starting to learn the details of what had occurred during the preceding days in Srebrenica. The reason there were so few young adults in the flood of refugees was because the Bosnian Serbs had murdered them, and those who had escaped were on the run, hiding or fleeing for their lives."
"I went to one refugee camp that the United Nations was helping run for people seventy-five years of age and older. It was as pathetic as it was appalling and tragic. All these elderly people were living twenty-five to a room in a tiny, decrepit schoolhouse that had only a partial roof. Each of them was sleeping on a thin blue rubber mattress and had a little bag containing food or clothing from the UN High Commission for Refugees, which was now everything they owned. They had been driven out of their villages, their families killed or dispersed to God knows where, and this was what they had to look forward to for the rest of their lives...."
"Within days, we assumed responsibility for organizing the evacuation of the Krajina Serbs, who had been bypassed by Croatian military forces and were now refugees, living in a  hostile area and fearing retribution from angry Croats. Many had fled ahead of Operation Storm, but a lot of them were still trapped behind the Croatian front lines. In what became a showcase of human tragedy and the viciousness of human nature, this motley collection of tens of thousands of impoverished men, women and children left Krajina by motorcade, on tractors, bikes, carts, horses or whatever vehicles they could find, with as many of their household possessions as they could carry, and travelled through parts of Croatia to other, Serb-held areas. All of this was carried live on TV around the world Despite the supposed protection of Croatian police and UN forces, those convoys of old women and children, riding in the backs of hundreds of tractors and carts, were pelted with rocks, eggs and anything else people could get their hands on all along the route out of Serb Krajina. It was a travesty and, again, the UN was powerless to prevent it."

And he has placed on subjective perspective born of real-time and on-site experience an issue that is repeatedly raised by Canada's federal opposition parties, forever critical of all decisions made by the current government relating to Canada's involvement in meeting the international challenge of fighting against the massed forces of malevolently-directed terrorists in their pursuit of gaining conscripts and territory while violently disrupting national stability; torturing, raping, enslaving, murdering their way into odious notoriety as international threats.

"The United Nations had no concept of how to build multinational forces into one effective team for a mission and, worse than that, it usually had no concept of what kind of mission it would be asking that team to do. We were doing things in the former Yugoslavia that no one had been prepared for, and even though it was dawning on some of our military and civilian leaders that UN peacekeeping operations were a thing of the past, there was no way that we could get past that mantra of 'peacekeeper, peacekeeper, peacekeeper'.
"...Yet our soldiers were sent into the Balkans under Chapter 6 of the UN charter, a peacekeeping mission where they could use their weapons only to protect themselves. As a result, we put soldiers and sailors and airmen and airwomen, who served on the ground, in positions where they saw brutal acts that they were powerless to stop. That was a scar that a lot of our people brought back from the Balkans, and a scar that the entire Canadian Forces, particularly the army, brought back as an institution."

Yet it is the outdated and useless concept of Canadians as peacekeepers in a volatile and violent world that the federal opposition partners keep referring to; that it is only as peacekeepers that our troops should be dispatched to meet the challenge of medievally-brutal terrorists meting out mass bloodbaths to religious and ethnic minorities as they sweep through Africa and the Middle East now, in their religiously-inspired campaign to dedicate the world and its community of people to Islamofascism.

Yes, of course we agonize like this every spring, wondering when winter will ever leave, and why spring is so tardily ambivalent. Glimpses of the past that our memory willingly serves up if we really press the matter recall other spring-time arrivals when felt equally hard-put-upon by a cranky spent winter refusing to recognize its best-before date, and a timid spring that can't recall when its arrival date was meant to be.

Surely, we convince ourselves, this year is much, much worse, and it seems as though the cold will never relent, the snow will ever melt, and as we concern ourselves over the welfare of returning birds and the lack of accessibility to green shoots, insects and anything else that migrants will look for to sustain themselves, exhausted after their long flights, nature seems unperturbed.

Our ravine walk this early afternoon took us to the alternate portion of the Bilberry Creek ravine, necessitating that we cross des Epinettes, introducing Jack and Jill once again to whizzing traffic and the need to spring across the road to access half of the walk. On that side of the ravine the creek is almost in full thaw mode and roars downhill to make its way underground to the upper half. There is ample snow left, but it has a nasty dark crust atop it as it transforms into an unpleasant sight bearing little resemblance to the pristine blanket it once represented.

Although the morning dawned with heavy, dark clouds and light flurries after a night of rainfall and temperatures just hovering above freezing, the sun finally made its presence, warming the day to a tolerable 9 degrees making it possible for us to shed our winter jackets, but not, unfortunately, the boots and the cleats strapped over them to enable us to climb up and down icy trails.

The trails alternate between packed snow, degrading ice, and the bare forest floor turned into muck, and in some places pools of meltwater swimming with last year's foliage. Not entirely pleasant, but a fair facsimile of an energetic and appealing walk regardless.

We were just exiting the ravine yesterday afternoon, quite early, when we came across him. Usually we see him later in the day. He and his wife have two rescue dogs, one a terrier mix the other a Lab mix. Both of the dogs have their issues, from their days living elsewhere, before they were surrendered to a dog-rescue organization.

They'd never posed a problem to our Button and Riley in the past, and nor do they now, to Jack and Jill. The female terrier becomes extraordinarily excited in the summer months when she's permitted to wade in the creek, by her owners. We don't let ours do anything like that, although most people do with their dogs. We once had the misfortune to find that Button had cut the area around her dewclaw badly, thanks to a beer bottle that some nit had tossed into the creek. The creek, in fact, becomes a depository for all manner of detritus, junk that people carelessly throw into it.

The larger of those two dogs has a tendency to shy away from people and from other dogs, barking furiously. When the two dogs are in their own backyard they're adamant about not permitting anyone but their owners to draw near. But they are loved by their owners, and why not? It was previous owners who had marked them for life by imposing a trauma of brutality on them.

The young man, Sri Lankan by birth, but Canadian by good fortune -- ours and his -- told us about an incident that had occurred in the ravine last week. There's a woman who often walks two middling-sized terriers. She never leaves them off leash, and often stands aside, holding them back when others approach on the trails. She's friendly enough, and has explained to us that one of her dogs is fiercely cranky. Both, in fact, bark furiously at people passing by, or perhaps it's their dogs they bark at.

The cranky dog has a nasty reputation among Bilberry Creek ravine dog walkers. It has often attacked other dogs, despite the care its owner takes to separate it from such opportunities. There are some dogs, much larger than the terrier, fearful of being anywhere in the vicinity of this dog. Our friend explained he had been walking with his two, and suddenly around the corner, the two dogs appeared -- on leash of course -- and his Lab mix reacted by pouncing on the belligerent dog. He separated them immediately, but, he said, the woman went out of her mind with rage.

She plastered the air with vicious language, and although he said he did his best to calm her down, nothing would assuage her anger, she just kept on screaming fairly horrible things at him. This went on interminably, he said; he should simply have left, but he kept trying to instill some calm into the hysterical woman. Finally, he said, he became so angry himself if she'd been a man he would have hit her.

It's  unfortunate, but these things do happen.We've experienced our own unfortunate encounters on occasion in the ravine, with dogs whose socialization left much to be desired, and whose owners' attitudes sometimes weren't much better than their dogs'. But you turn the chapter, unless something really dreadful occurs, and move on. We did our best to assure our friend he was not at fault, given the circumstances. And we'll continue to give those two middling terriers wide berth.

Hey! Me too, only make it snow, okay?

via Giphy

 

Sad to hear that James Bond has had to undergo surgery while filming the latest Bond film, Spectre. As a result of arthroscopic knee condition. James Bond, after all, is impervious to danger and physical harm because of his extraordinarily strong physique, and his amazing ability to counteract physical threats by instant reaction and immensely clever manoeuvres.

But there it is, poor James Bond in hospital, undergoing surgery, holding up filming on his latest flick. But, like a feline whose amazing capacity to evade death he mimics, he will survive to live yet another incredible caper.

And it must be comforting to him to know that he has the sympathy of others, like for example Sir Roger Moore who tweeted: "Sorry to hear Daniel Craig has sprained his knee on set #Spectre. Being 007 is not without its hazards. I'm available to step in if needed." So kind and considerate.

And of course the hazards are many. The man of steel nerves, indestructible physiognomy and instant reaction faced death numerous times. In Skyfall, for example, it has been pointed out by a panel of medical professionals, our hero is shot with a depleted uranium shell, an armour-piercing ground used to destroy tanks.

It "would have turned his lungs inside out and killed him", commented the medical team. Even if he survived the fragments of uranium shell exposure to them "would greatly increase his cancer risk". But not our superman of exquisitely formidable resistance to anything that would destroy the lives of lesser mortals.

Removing a bullet from his shoulder on his own as he did after the uranium shell encounter "Risks blood loss, lack of consciousness, nerve and muscular damage and the infection risk is huge", cautioned the health professionals. Ah yes, but this is no ordinary human being, after all.

And when he tumbled from the roof of a train into a river, that close encounter with the Angel of Death "could sever his spinal cord or break his neck", if he hadn't drowned, an instant paraplegic. Not our James Bond, the world's supreme acrobatist.

Oh and when he wrestled with a henchman underwater in a icy Scottish loch, survival would have been miraculous: "Fighting means he would use oxygen quickly, so it's improbable he'd get out in time. Hypothermia would set in very quickly and he'd struggle to move." Don't these medical professionals realize precisely whose foray into the dangerous channels of crime and violence they are interpreting?

Doctors, health professionals, forensics: what do they know when it comes to the arcane, impossible, yet eminently possible escapades of a timeless, undefeated hero?

By the time our appointment with the veterinarian at the Town & Country Veterinarian Hospital at Ogdensburg was completed, physical check-ups on Jack and Jill completed, bloodwork done, the reception area had begun to fill up, and though I felt distracted, I did note the presence of an increasing number of pets and their owners. One young woman had walked into one of the rooms set aside for physical examinations with a beautiful looking Golden Retriever, leaving an elderly man sitting outside in the reception area.

He was comfortably stout, and looked worn by life, glancing about at others gathered there. He struck up a conversation with my husband, standing in front of the reception desk to pay our bill and make arrangements for the following week's surgery for our two mopheads. I was seated with Jack and Jill and directly across the seating area there was a woman with a Boston Bull terrier and a Shih Tzsu, awaiting their appointment. An American, she told me, but living temporarily in Ottawa, scheduled to leave shortly for Arizona, she will be sorry to leave Ottawa where her family has made many friends. She was there lured by the fees charged in challenge to the off-putting expensive fees back in Ottawa.

Before long, the elderly man addressed me as well, and in a short space of time I learned that he had lost his wife who loved and knew how to expertly handle dogs, a year and a half ago. She had been eleven years his junior. They had one child, the young woman I'd seen earlier with the Golden. Her mother's death struck his daughter particularly hard, he said; introduction to the impermanence of life is hard at any age, obviously. She doted on the dog now, just as he doted on his daughter. Nothing is good enough for the dog, he said, the most expensive dog food is provided, and strict rules have been imposed by her in their household to avoid giving the dog, now twelve, any type of 'human food'.

This dog, he said was the precise opposite in personality to its predecessor, another Golden Retriever that had lived for 14 years whose passing he and his wife truly mourned. The earlier one was so smart, he told me, that once when his wife had locked herself out of their vehicle, she coaxed the dog to pull the car key out of the ignition and transmit it to her hand extended to receive it through the narrow opening that resulted when she had left the window open a few inches for air circulation. This one, he said, though his daughter loves it, has remained over its years mischief-prone, getting into all kinds of trouble.

When his daughter emerged with the dog, the man's face broke from its almost morose appearance to an instant beam of pride like the sun emerging from dark clouds, and he said "and this is my baby girl"; not meaning the dog, obviously. The young woman seemed shy and constrained, and I complimented them on how well the dog looked, almost puppy-like for its age, with a gleaming coat, alert eyes and a very handsome conformation.

And then I blurted a statement I was later to regret. I should have said that the baby in our family isn't as lovely in appearance as his, instead what I said was: our baby is now 52 years old, the youngest among three of our children, and the man's jaw dropped. He repeated: 52? Oh well, I said, we're 78, after all, and he said, looking like a truly sorry sack, that he was 70. I felt instantly regretful, as though I'd engaged in some kind of one-upsmanship of familial pride with a man whose fairly recent loss and emotional frailty didn't need anything like that.