There now, summer is officially over and fall is sliding into winter. It's official because my husband has removed the canopy from the deck, and the garden furniture is now slated to go into storage. It's official because we finally finished cleaning up the gardens, cutting back all the perennials, composting all the annuals, raking up all the fallen foliage. It's official because today the grass has been mowed for the very last time this season. It's official because my husband put down fertilizer on the grass to encourage its hibernation and spring-time revival.

And it's official because a seed-and-nut tray has been placed out on the stone bench close to the bird feeder to ensure that the neighbourhood squirrels know they haven't been deserted over the winter months. And to keep them from their strenuous acrobatic efforts to reach the seeds and nuts in the bird feeder; to leave them for the birds.

Bluejays are continuing to come around; their bright blue foliage is a nice contrast to the scarlet of the cardinals. The single dove that enjoys spending its loafing time in the garden close to the food source has returned and can be seen making itself comfortable for hours at a time; even the presence of saucy little adolescent red squirrels won't make this dove move if it hasn't a mind to. We can only hope that self-preservation kicks in at appropriate times; when, for example, the black cat next door goes on the prowl as it sometimes does, around the shrubs in the garden, lying in wait for any opportunities that may present themselves.

We've now placed out for municipal garbage collection the last of the filled-to-capacity large compost bags which are used for the production of finished compost during the growing season. All that's left to do is to empty the garden pots at the front of the house. All of the garden pots at the back of the house have already been emptied, in preparation for storage under the deck, covered by a large tarp until the ice and snow of the coming winter departs and they can be resurrected once again next spring.

Although there was uncertainty as there always is, about the outcome of this federal election in Canada, news reportage and the polls taken at various times throughout the longer-than-usual election campaign did point in the direction of the Conservative government being ushered out by the electorate. This Prime Minister, who has governed the country ably and with distinction had a controversial relationship with the national press and they took every opportunity at their disposal with few exceptions to portray him in as murky a light as they could manage.

The civil service conveniently forgot that previous Liberal administrations, one as recent as the Chretien years in power, did the civil service no favours in ruthlessly cutting back personnel and services, following hard on the Mulroney years which began the process. You had to reach back to the Diefenbaker years to find a similar clamp-down on the civil service. These are fairly cushy jobs with their unions always in an adversarial position toward the employer. Outstanding workplace benefits and retirement packages that were the envy of the private sector awaited government employees, some of whom earned their keep, many of whom barely bothered taking advantage of all manner of perceived entitlements at the expense of the taxpayer. That segment of the voting population, whom tradition mandates be neutral politically worked hard to convince non-federal-employees that this was a government that needed to be turfed.

And it was. Yesterday, Canadians voted overwhelmingly to bring back a Liberal government. Conveniently losing memory of Liberal governments' penchant to wallow in corruption; even when, late in the campaign a whiff of just that surfaced portending the future, it did nothing to remind Canadians that the man who has governed us for a decade was the very exemplar of rigorous morality. Some of his unfortunate choices while in power worked to disfavour him; chief among them was the public mood to demonize a man many simply took an aversion to.

The tandem of a Liberal federal government alongside a Liberal provincial government which has been tainted with the scandal of wastefulness and corruption does not bode well for the near future of the Canadian economy and social cohesion. But the die is cast and we can no longer, with each enjoying a majority mandate, exercise a franchise alternately for the near future.

Last evening we had an exultant telephone call from our granddaughter, now in her second year of university studies in Toronto. She had finally accomplished what she had looked forward to for the past two years; made the most of the opportunity her attainment of the age of majority granted her; to cast her vote. Satisfaction at the very least, lies therein.

We are never quite prepared for the onset of winter. Yes, we're well aware of its inevitability, and take note of the passage of time made manifest by the visual, physical alterations in our environment, from the macro: shorter daylight hours -- sharper-cooling night-time temperatures -- to the micro-indications of less light and warmth impacting on all growing things, we prepare ourselves psychologically, yet the physical impact surprises us.

It's hard to become accustomed yet again to the need to pull on cold-weather clothing in protection against the cold. And when we waken to the reality of roofs covered with thick frost layers and foliage spontaneously dropping, as they do from our weeping mulberries all in one fell swoop, and the Morning Glory vines that hadn't been yet taken down wilting to death along with the tomato vines, we know that winter is on the cusp of our landscape's threshhold.

The garden looks bleak and abandoned by everything that maintained it through the growing months; the breeze that had ruffled the foliage during summer has turned into a wintry blast, in lock-step with the cold that erupted far earlier than the calendar usually prepares us for. That, throughout the course of the last few days, precipitation dropped in the form of snow squalls rather than rain was of little comfort to gardeners mourning the passing of the growing season.

We came across a highly unusual number of people in the ravine yesterday. One lovely man whom we haven't seen in a while was walking his beautifully mannered standard poodle; everyone is interested in our little black puppies who three days ago turned a full year of age. There was a reason we haven't seen much of him lately, he explained. He was separated now from his wife. While he lives now a bit of a distance he returns on occasion to see the dog, and walk him. He was concerned that their son in his late teens is interested in a career that would keep him busy in commercial kitchens. We told him that one of my cousins' sons had aspired at the same age to be a cook, and now approaching 60, he looks back on a long and satisfying career in that field. Hoping that this would reassure him.

Another group we came across was a young man with a tiny girl holding the leash of an even tinier dog. The child was in full command; confidently self-assured, and happily capable of verbally communicating in a way that much older children are incapable of. Her character, even at barely four years of age, was there for anyone to read and to admire. Another separated family, with the father living on the Quebec side and visiting his one-time family to ensure that the ties that bind remained securely in place.

Jack and Jill approach each encounter with other dogs with a vast appetite for challenging them, Jillie in particular barking furiously, and Jackie strenuously pulling ahead. Once they're in close proximity the little oafs shrink back with anxiety until they're confident that no harm will come to them as they evaluate the other dogs' intentions in the way that canines communicate. They certainly had ample opportunity yesterday to practise their social skills. They've a long way to go yet.

Winter is arriving early in the Ottawa Valley. Although it's just mid-October, and snow flurries generally appear a month later, yesterday we 'enjoyed' a number of light and (thankfully) brief snow events; just too cold, too icily windy for rain. Instead we had little snow squalls. The sky veered fitfully from dark threatening cloud cover to interludes of benign, bright sun; polarized competition.

We dressed in mind of the cold and even little Jack and Jill were outfitted with light little sweatshirts under their harnesses. They paid no mind to the light coverings, and helpfully lifted their little legs to enable us to pull them on. It's their collars and their harnesses for which they reserve their irritation, attempting continually to pull them off, biting them fruitlessly. The harnesses we're currently using are heavy-duty ones, however, and it will be more than difficult for them to destroy these as they have the lighter ones we use in the summer months.

My husband had decided to cut the carry-handles off their carrying bags, since they too are extremely irritating and our little adorables tend to stick their heads through them. We took those bags with us along with Jack and Jill and drove to Carleton University's indoor sport arena where the last decade or so the semi-annual spring and fall antique shows are held. I find the artificial turf in that cavernous building quite difficult to walk on, it can seem unstable. Those events did, initially, closely resemble genuine antique shows, but over the years they've been succeeded by shows heavier on the 'collectibles' side of the equation than antiques. And now, finally, that's how they're advertising themselves in recognition of the transition where antiques are in short supply there and the major focus is simply on the collectibles that people in this area seem far more interested in.

The result is that there are now few authentic antique dealers setting up booths there, and dealers of art are infinitely less likely to appear. We saw, in fact, few of either category. But our old acquaintance from whom we usually acquire a painting or two each season did turn out and it was lovely to see him. His large, genial frame is more gaunt than it used to be, though he told us he was in good health. His focus is mostly on the acquisition and sale of elderly prints of high quality, but he also carries oil and watercolour paintings and he knows the kind of art that we prefer. In fact, he remembers the very first painting we'd bought from him decades ago, a Mower-Martin landscape.

This time he had another landscape he knew would be of interest to us; this one of the Meach Lake-Mulvihill area of Gatineau Park. It's not of the century-old era of paintings that we usually tend toward, painted in the 1980s, but the artist is well known for his excellent landscapes and this one has joined our little collection. Jack and Jill received close attention from our friend, an animal lover who though he himself and his partner have three cats, neighbours' dogs are regularly walked by him with huge mutual appreciation.

We hadn't gone far into the ravine this early afternoon when we came across a old ravine friend of ours. First, we saw Toby, a small terrier-mix, still a happy-go-lucky, though now deaf, scruffy little dog who was one of our little Riley's first ravine pals. Riley was in second heaven, following Toby into one of the creek tributaries for the first time, coming out coated with muck, but sublimely happy about the experience, both of them romping happily through the woods together.

Riley is gone, it will be almost a year in a few months' time, and Toby is still meandering about, but rarely now in the ravine. He is taken more often to the west end, where one of his owner's daughters lives, and where her own mother, at 92, is installed in a full-care old-age home. Our friend, in fact, has taken a break out from painting the interior of her house. She's cleaning and tidying it up, painting it in neutral colours, at the advice of her daughter, a real-estate agent.

Her daughter has introduced her to a small, two-bedroom bungalow in nearby Almonte, owned by an elderly couple prepared to move, and she was smitten with the place. Its owners had prepared their little house for sale, just as her daughter had urged her to do; removing from it most vestiges of the personality of their owners, as an invitation to prospective buyers to move right in and make it their very own. And this she was prepared to do, but first had to sell her own house, the very house where she had raised her daughters, with her husband.

They had been married for 33 years, when he died. We had known him only slightly; for the most part it was she whom we'd always come across in the ravine over the years. The area in which they lived was distant from our own; the ravine is what brought us together. Her relationship with her husband was one of mutual independence; their closeness was occasioned by the formality of the marriage bond, not an emotional intimacy of mutual need. After he died and his absence mourned, she found another companion with whom she had more of an informal partnership, and she thrived within it.

Two years ago -- since that was how long it has been since we last saw her -- that man too died. She had received a sudden telephone call informing her that he'd had an accident. He had been out with his brother and they'd been drinking, so both were feeling a bit tingly, as it were. They had parted when their evening together was over, each to return to their respective homes. Her partner had gone down a flight of stairs in an underground pass on his way to access public transit, when he missed a step and fell down four concrete steps. That was what it took to end his life.

As he fell it seemed he had attempted to right himself and in the process fell on his back, then fell from side to side, each side of his skull hitting another step as he continued falling, causing blunt force trauma to his brain of a severity from which he never recovered. He was in a deep coma for several days, and then he died.

She found his eyeglasses tucked into one of the pockets of the jacket he was wearing, and hypothesized that he hadn't been wearing them at the time of the accident, because he tended to use them only for reading, though they were bifocals meant as well for long distance. She thought he might have been looking at or dialling his cellphone, so his attention was elsewhere as he went down the stairs with the evening's dim lighting and his slight state of inebriation complicating things.

We've had some special guests at the bird feeder lately. Cedar waxwings and bluejays. When we first came to the Ottawa area over 40 years ago we would commonly see bluejays. Now it seems the only time we see and hear them is rarely, but generally in the spring and the fall and only in the ravine, where we see hawks spiralling above on the wind far more often than we do the jays. But a pair recently visited our birdfeeder and they were more than welcome to help themselves.

My husband didn't see the cedar waxwing and thought perhaps I'd seen one of the cardinals, but of course there's a huge size disparity between the waxwings and the cardinals and certainly of colour as well. So, though he's the birdwatcher, from such long association with him, I also recognize many birds, and was able to assure him that I did indeed see what I claimed to have seen.

The birdfeeder has been busy hosting chickadees, nuthatches, a variety of sparrows including song sparrows, and slate-backed juncos. The goldfinches which were regular visitors have long since departed on their winter migratory route. The cardinals remain faithful feeders. And doves returned after quite a long hiatus. We sometimes see hairy or downy woodpeckers at the fat feeder we've got strung up near the seeds-and-nuts dispenser. It's amazing how swiftly the feeder, which has a decent capacity, is reduced with all the visitors.

We've got black and grey and red squirrels as regular visitors, along with tiny chipmunks. Although two baby red squirrels could compete with the chipmunks for adorable size and presence. And calm in our presence, as well.

One of the grey squirrels has succeeded in devising an opportunistic way of foiling the inverted funnel installed on the pole the birdfeeder sits upon. He extends his body, upside-down, with hind feet under the baffle, then swings around to grab the feeder itself with his front paws, in a swift acrobatic motion that succeeds in vaulting him onto the feeder. The solution is to slide the baffle down a few inches so he won't succeed in that manoeuvre, and my husband will get around to it.

Meanwhile, plenty of seeds and nuts fall to the area underneath the feeder, so the ground-feeding birds and the small, furry wildlife alike can feast to their hearts' content. My husband has decided that for this coming winter he won't put out the elaborate feeding station he's presented in the past several winters Instead, a rudimentary tray will do, to be filled with the same kind of offerings that brought raccoons, squirrels and birds alike to scrub about selecting what suited their appetite, with the birdfeeder left to the sole preserve of birds.

Each successive day that we go out on our daily walks into the ravine reveals an inevitable advance in the colour tints that have gradually turned the landscape into a familiar/unfamiliar colour palette of transcendent beauty that catches in our throats and fixes our eyes; no doubt reflected in the lens of our eyes. Of course, we've seen this transformation year over year. But each time it presents, it is both familiar and unfamiliar.

A treat for the eye, that at first you tend to believe is so unique you've never seen its like before. But of course you have. Or a visual treat very close to what you're now so impressed with, as the foliage turns into a kaleidoscope of colour and the sun makes that colour look almost translucent as the rays find their way through the canopy of still-full leaf-mass to illuminate the scene below.

So, day-to-day, we anticipate what will greet us, whether the copse of maples that line a certain shallow valley along the way will yet have reached the apex of their colour change; these are maples whose foliage that, like the poplars and the birch, turn a bright yellow. Other maples in the forest situated elsewhere as stand-alones turn a bright crimson, and many of those leafs have already tumbled to the forest floor. Those leafs from certain poplars that we've seen often which have a bright green stripe running diagonally along the bright yellow, are fascinating in their contrast.

The apples in the many wild apple trees are sweet, moist and ripe, and surprisingly unblemished. For well over a month my husband has selected lovely-looking specimens as Jack and Jill prance with huge expectation around his feet, waiting anxiously to be given small chunks of apple, an afternoon treat during the walk. They are familiar with where the tree that grows these sweetest prized apples is located, tending to stop under it, to look up at my husband, awaiting his reaction.

We've not yet seen an abundance of fungi, but we likely soon will, as the rain events continue and darker, shorter days make their inroads. And then we expect to see bright orange, pale blue, light red and creamy-white mushrooms of various shapes and sizes springing up here and there. Surprisingly, we've come across ordinary-enough-looking mushrooms growing in the crook of a years-dead old ironwood.