These are unmistakably wintry days, frigid temperatures, cutting winds and a wan winter sun one day, snow tumbling through the atmosphere the next. These are not weather experiences made to order, but they do tend to order the sequence of our days throughout the winter months. There are times when we hesitate to venture out for our regular daily rambles in the woods yet far more frequently there is no question but that we will, and we do.

Sometimes the very thought of layering ourselves in clothing to fend off the cold, and doing the same with Jackie and Jillie give us pause. But it's mostly the thought of forcing their little paws and legs into protective gear like the Muttluks and then watching as they race off in enthusiastic exultation at being out in the snow despite the cold, one or another boots being flung off in the process that really makes us hesitate.

And when that happens I hold the one who has lost a boot while my husband negotiates it back into place. Odds are even that the replaced boot will shoot off again, or alternately remain in place for the remainder of our hike through the snowy ravine.

On winter afternoons the woods under overcast skies tend to take on a dimly crepuscular aura. True, that adds to a sense of mystery; as though one has entered the proverbial the deep, dark woods. Having entered, however, the dusky appearance seems to lift, and one proceeds along trails muted in the tranquility of the snow, surrounded by the trees resembling silent sentinels absent foliage, the trunks dark against the snow on the forest floor.

If it happens to be snowing while you're there in the woods. the overall appearance becomes mist-like as though a faint white fog has appeared, a veil of falling white snowflakes. When it's a sunny afternoon on the other hand, while the afternoon forest still has a dim, dusky appearance, the canopy above is illuminated with a golden brightness, a gift of the setting sun.

The twilight appeal of the forest is quite lovely and utterly peaceful. These are landscape nuances of time and place that fail to impress our two little dogs, but they do us -- enormously.

Yesterday afternoon after we had returned from our ravine walk with our little fellows and I'd finished putting the finishing touches to dinner preparations, I sat down to read the newspapers when Jackie and Jillie went into overdrive, yapping and barking, hysterics which they invariably indulge in whenever the doorbell rings. It was a special delivery for our renewed passports.

My husband was out, he'd gone to pick up one of the tires and rims of the car that was deflating. A week ago he'd had the mechanics at Canadian Tire change the car's tires from all-weather to ice tires, a twice-yearly necessity that he used to do himself until I finally convinced him that at age 81 he should leave that physical exertion to professionals. He'd taken the truck in to get its tires changed weeks earlier, but last year he had done them both himself, as usual.

Last week, when the work was done and he picked up the car, he was surprised to find work that he hadn't authorized done; it was a complete vehicle check to which all the indices checked no problem, but it was a surprise to my husband that it had been done since he had never indicated he wanted it. He's well known there as a long-time customer. He also used to change the oil himself in all of our succession of vehicles over the decades, and in the past few years that changed too.

He spoke to the supervisor, a man he knows fairly well, expressing his surprise that something he had no reason to ask to be done had been, and he was assured that the charge related to it would be withdrawn. What my husband did next is typical of him, he went to the nearby Great Canadian Superstore, bought one of their huge Black Forest cakes, and took it over to the Canadian Tire garage.

Yesterday, when he returned with the deflating tire asking that it be checked, it was with the knowledge that evidently because the garage is so busy, they had overlooked due diligence to determine that all the ice tires they were fitting back on the car were in good shape. On its return the tire in question was tested for leaks, but there were none. What kept the tire from holding air was a rim of rust, duly then, sanded down.

Back my husband went for yet another Black Forest cake.

As nature's creatures, among many, we have been fortunate to inherit a world of wonders. The seasons come and they give way to others, each of which brings their very own fascinating transformations of the living theatre we call existence. Of the four discrete seasons, spring and summer likely rate as favourites for most people, but then, thinking about autumn's transition and winter's arrival our thoughts linger fondly on memories and landscapes both have brought us through the years.

In nature, immersing ourselves in our natural surroundings from time to time, we renew our relationship with the force that bred us. We happen to be personally irreligious, with no faith or belief in a deity, but perhaps it could be said that our veneration for nature is a type of faith; our creator, our nurturer. At this time of year the frenzy of believers and non-believers alike preparing for the festivals linked to religion that mark the arrival of the Winter Solstice, translated for Christians as the birth of Christ marks that great public holiday of Christmas.

We enjoy the excitement, the good feeling, the lights and celebration at a remove. For Jews, the festival of Chanukah, a time of historical Judaic deliverance and perseverance for a perpetually persecuted people, often corresponds in time with Christmas. It has, of latter years, been brightened up in reflection of that coincidental timing, from a tranquil remembrance of gratitude to one of excited joyfulness, lest all the fun and favour be exclusive to Christianity. A kind of inclusivity that children of all religions are able to share.

While many of our neighbours light up the night sky with colourful displays of lighting, the festive atmosphere encompasses those for whom Christmas is a majority time of happiness and nostalgia. The frenzied shopping excursions people fling themselves into is the less admirable function of the holiday, however, one we're happy to absent ourselves from.

We seek our daily comfort in the solace of the winter forest in the company of our two little dogs. There we amble about on snow-laden trails, the forest floor deepening in its winter snowpack, trees looming gaunt and unleafed above, and on a sunny day the golden rays of that life-giving orb illuminating the forest canopy as it begins to set in mid-afternoon.

This is our treasure-hunt, our daily ambulations through the forested ravine where each day brings us renewal and gratitude.

Snow was still falling when we roused ourselves out of bed yesterday morning. And the forecast was for milder temperatures than what we've been experiencing for the past week and a half, so that was cheering. All outdoor surfaces were well covered with light, fluffy snow, tufts of it gracing animate and inanimate alike, creating that unsurpassed micro-landscape of evanescent beauty that captures the eye and warms the soul.

Because of the volume of snow that had come down we had our doubts about how well we'd be able to flounder through the trails that hadn't yet had time for people to begin the tamping-down process. We discovered that a few hardy souls had been out before us, but no trail through the snow had yet been established, so the going was pretty tough.

It requires just so much more energy and determination to forge through layers of snow. Breaking trail was a breeze when we were young, but at 80, it's become difficult. And when you do, it's quite a narrow trail. Jackie and Jillie didn't need their winter boots, since the high was minus-4C, a cold they are able to tolerate, even with newfallen snow sticking to their paws and their hair. They love the snow and enjoy romping in it. As long as it isn't that cold that it penetrates and makes them extremely uncomfortable with long exposures.

Munchkin and Newton

We did come across someone else walking two little dogs; one her own, the other a neighbour's. We've known Donna for many years and she, like us, has had a succession of companion pets to accompany her in the ravine for long walks. The two little dogs, are considerably older than our two, nowhere near as rambunctious, given to plodding along on their short little legs. They don't stand as tall as Jackie and Jillie and where the snow hasn't been tamped down, perambulation becomes quite difficult for them, one a part Maltese, the other a miniature long-haired Dachshund.

The four little dogs hadn't seen one another in quite an age, so their meeting on the trail represented a kind of snow-party, as they gathered and communed with one another. We've no idea, after all, what transpires between dogs familiar with each other, nor what it is they possibly communicate but it might be as pedestrian as the manner in which humans greet one another, and talk briefly of insignificant matters, even the weather.

Eric Collier's autobiographical sketch of pioneering the wilds of the Chilcotin in British Columbia in the 1940s and 50s was quite a read. This man, skilled in the poetry of language in descriptions of the various manifestations of raw nature in his book Three Against the Wilderness, left a valuable legacy for all Canadians interested in learning what they can of Canada's westernmost province at that period.

He writes of the unflappable courage and homemaking skills of his wife Liliane, of their son Veasy's homespun education in the vast forests surrounding their modest one-room cabin that despite its isolation taught the boy survival skills without neglecting his introduction to advanced science and mathematics. At age six Veasy Eric Collier was already a skilled trapper like his father Eric, with his own trapline to maintain.

What the Colliers had set out to do was to re-invigorate a wilderness area that had been degraded by the fur trade, at a time when trappers, both indigenous and foreign, had extracted from the Chilcotin in the Cariboo Mountain Range all the beaver they could trap, leaving none to maintain the critical water system with their dams so that natural water runways simply dried up, with the consequence that wildlife ceased flourishing and abandoned the area.

A proposal to the B.C. Ministry of Natural Resources succeeded in having two pairs of beavers delivered to their care. With these four young beavers, placed in old abandoned beaver colonies, the population soon exploded as the original four adapted and industriously began the mammoth work of natural restoration. Their swift success in restoring the waterways and lakes of the region was of monumental usefulness to area ranchers, providing for their cattle, for as the water was restored enabling the cattle to find and make use of sources of reliable water so were vital grasses requiring irrigation to feed the cattle.

Browsing mammals returned to the area, along with otters, mink, fishers, deer, moose, bear and smaller creatures that find their home in natural woodlands of the boreal forests. Eric Collier wrote of the winter of 1948 when British Columbia experienced one of its coldest winters ever. So cold that the mighty Fraser, into which the waterways of Chilcotin pour, froze almost in its entirety. The amount of snow that fell that winter was astronomical, the cold and the snow-depth killing birds, juvenile animals and people alike. Unable to find their normal food supply due to the snow coverage, mature animals starved and froze to death.

Normally temperate British Columbia is now once again experiencing unusual cold and snow. Although not to the extent that it did back then. And so, coincidentally, is Ottawa, the second coldest, snowiest capital in the world. We've been locked into a prolonged cold snap and have received far more snow than would seem normal for this early part of winter; in fact even before the arrival of the Winter Solstice. Now, when we enter our local forested ravine, we tend to flounder through the snow, and without bundling up in layers for warmth the experience of a woodland jaunt would be far less pleasurable than it is.

On Saturday evening we settled down to watch a German film titled "Labyrinth of Lies". The film is a period piece, taking place in Germany fifteen years after the Second World War. When the vanquished Germany of fascist Nazi aspirations was licking its wounds and carrying on with life. It was reaching toward normalcy, not quite spurning the recent past, but tucking it away in some obscure place in peoples' apprehensions, generally disinterested in disinterring any aspect of what had just recently passed.

And most particularly the Holocaust. It was not just denial, but indifference. Germany felt it had suffered and suffered enough, that any recollection of what they had no wish to recall, and felt they knew nothing of was unwelcome. Most Germans claimed never to have heard the placename Auschwitz much less be aware of what it signified as the most hideously-linked place in Poland where Germany felt it safe from public censure to get on with its plan to obliterate the presence of Jews throughout occupied Europe through a plan of physical erasure by any means proving successful.

The Final Solution employed many means of extinguishing the lives of Jews, young and old, but it discovered the most efficient in a combination of suffocating gas chambers and vast crematoria whose chimneys lofted to the heavens belched the minuscule blackened remains of millions of innocent children, women and men, infants and elderly alike. In the minds of most Germans it never happened. In the minds of German officials it was best to behave as though it never happened. No reckoning required, no inner search for the rationale that held the liberation of the world would be accomplished by obliterating the presence of an ethno-cultural-religious group whose members had been recognized as achieving great forward strides in advancing civilization, in artistic and scientific breakthroughs enriching humanity.

Had they been a group whose presence on Earth added nothing of significance to the greater good, their anguish and destruction would still have cried to the heavens for moral retribution.

The year 1958 saw a newly introduced staff member to the German federal court prosecution team, a young man whose idealism was groomed by his memory of a father who instructed his son to "always do the right thing". The father had never returned from the war front, and fifteen years on was presumed dead, but his memory remained precious and large in his son's mind, as someone who rejected the Third Reich, inspiring the son to take on a campaign to restore honour and dignity to a Germany he loved, and throughout the course of his passionate adventure in discovering the horrors of the Holocaust, discovering that no one was interested, everything chose to deny, and his course of action was doomed to fail because of governmental obstructionism.

His commitment to cleansing Germany of its immense moral blot against humanity spurred him to see justice done impartially in the recognition of the great crime committed against Europe's Jewish community. First-hand narrative accounts of the suffering and horrors witnessed by survivors left him shaken and appalled. The grief expressed by survivors burrowed deep into his own soul. Discovering that his venerated father was in fact a member of the Nazi Party, the chief prosecutor attempted to assuage his junior member's despair by assuring him that membership had been universal within the legal community. Just as the knowledge of the vicious oppression of the Jews was common knowledge among average Germans who claimed to have known nothing of what had occurred.

His commitment and determination against all odds, however, and the support he was given by his superior, the federal prosecutor general, who just happened to be a Jew who had been a wartime slave worker in Auschwich, saw Johann Radmaan, the young prosecutor, eventually prevail. His desperate search to apprehend the Angel of Death, Dr. Josef Mengele, came to naught, but he had the satisfaction of seeing the Mossad capture Adolf Eichmann, and was outraged when Germany had no interest in requesting his extradition from Israel, to face public trial and the consequences due him.

His efforts did result in the arrest and prosecution and trial of relatively routine, minor members of the Nazi military, complicit in the extermination of their helpless Jewish victims.

After yesterday's bone-chilling ravine walk where, walking along the forest trails we stopped not only to regain our breath after forging uphill in the snow, but to look backward, before us and everywhere surrounding us as the sun illuminated the newfallen snow creating vistas of virginal white perfection. We'd gone out earlier than usual. And although it was a Sunday there were scant few others on the trails, despite the clear blue sky.

My husband had been musing about returning to stained glass landscaping. He had built a door awhile ago but never got around to filling it with a stained glass interior. We've quite a number of his doors in our home. They're colourful and cheerful, another venue to showcase nature. Stained glass lends itself wonderfully to capturing light and transforming colours into variations of themselves. Sometimes it's as though whatever is depicted actually has life in it, and it does, of a sort.

He has plenty of stained glass in reserve, but needed other things, so a drive to the west end of the city was in order to visit his source for all the needed items that go into a stained glass window. This will be his winter project. He always has a winter project. So, off we went. The preferential route is the Eastern Parkway skirting the city centre, and linking to the Western Parkway. It's a scenic route taking us past many areas of Ottawa familiar to tourists.

We drove along Sussex Drive once arrived downtown, past foreign embassies, the Mint and the National Gallery, the Peace Memorial and Byward Market, the Chateau Laurier and the Parliament Buildings. We also passed the site of the newly-opened Holocaust centre and the War Museum. In the spring we will make a trip for the purpose of visiting the Holocaust centre.

On the return trip we passed the External/Foreign Affairs complex where my husband worked as his career concluded. The Ottawa River, we noted, is well on its way in places to freezing over. Before long, avid ice fishers will be out when the ice is deemed thick enough to bear weight, to put up their ice huts and cut holes in the ice to spend hours out there fishing.

My husband selected what he needed to begin. But he will first have to decide what he wants to design and produce the cartoon out of which he will cut and number parts like a puzzle, to be pieced together to finalize what he envisions will be another bit of stained art glasswork.