In the realm of a cautionary tale: The virtues inherent in using our bodies to their full physical potential appropriate to age and opportunities and condition of health are self-evident in healthier outcomes. But people should be guided by good common sense, and not push themselves beyond their physical endurance. My husband had for years in his late 60s and early 70s taken to running through the forested ravine. I could never have done that, nor did I. Eventually he realized his knees and ankles were being affected, and he stopped.

Yet there are many who do just that only to discover there are consequences inimical to their well-being, and that realization usually arrives when they find themselves in severe health challenges. The warning symptoms may have been there, but habit and devotion to a certain kind of repetitive and dearly held activities keep people from realizing there is a time to reassess.

One of our acquaintances whom we've known for many years through leisure encounters on the trails in the forest in our community, is one such example. Formerly with an emergency response unit of the RCMP, this very physical, fit man with an overload of nervous energy has been plagued in the past five years with a multitude of ills. And they're serious health problems. He was an avid extreme sport aficionado, and challenged his body continually to perform episodic extremes when he would participate in organized runs, bicycle competitions, and often enough combinations of various competitive sports.

Years ago he began suffering from lassitude, dizziness, faint spells and general lack of well being. Diagnosed with congenital water on the brain, he underwent a series of operations resulting in a shunt implant that drained the water from his brain into his abdominal cavity. The tiny implanted pump had to be recalibrated time and again until it was adequately fine-tuned and each time meant invasive surgery. His problem was solved, however, with the help of the implant.

That problem, in any event. He resumed running and bicycling and events-participation to challenge his store of energy and endurance. One bicycling collision and fall resulted in surgery on his clavicle and a shoulder. Discomfort continued requiring a second, more successful surgery. Convinced he was fully recovered he travelled out of country to take part in other competitions and the last one saw him in excruciating back pain. He had emergency disc surgery but the pain never quite subsided, leaving him unable to perform anything moderately physical in nature.

Restless by nature, pursuing opportunities to exert himself physically, he has been forced into early retirement, and forced by the circumstances of his failing physical properties to become close to a recluse, living with constant pain. Another surgery is scheduled, with the hope that he will be enabled to recover some of his former satisfaction in life. He's just a young man comparatively, in his mid-50s, after all. His wife gives us regular updates on his condition. She remains physically active, taking their three high-energy sheep-herding-breed dogs out for their energy-consuming daily forest hikes. Her continual remonstrations with her husband came to nought.

At the supermarket earlier today where we do our usual weekly shopping, there was navel oranges from South Africa and Egypt, dates from Iran, figs from Turkey, grapes from South Africa and clementines from Morocco. We usually enjoy oranges, clementines, grapes, dates, and figs. Today, we bought none of them, no dates, no figs, no navel oranges, no grapes, no clementines. These are all produce-exporting countries that express their avowed hostility to Israel, the Jewish state, and some of them threaten its existence as well.

As Jews, we have the freedom in Canada to express our own personal hostility to those who feel the Holocaust, which according to them didn't really exist, and if it did, it didn't kill as many Jews as evidence and history state, and in any event however many Jews were exterminated it simply wasn't enough. So we indulge in our own very personal boycott; one that obviously does no damage to the countries that produce the fruits that we will not eat, but which salves our sense of conscious justice.

It rained throughout the day yesterday, and when we awoke this morning it was still raining. No walk for us and our puppies in the ravine, alas. But by the time I put away all the groceries on our return home from shopping, and pre-prepared a casserole of macaroni, chopped green onions, green peas, canned salmon and a cheese choux for dinner, the rain had petered out.

So off we went into the forest, down into the ravine, for a mind-calming walk-about. A somewhat physically difficult one as it happens, since the snowpack has been both melting and softening, so that every step taken sinks deeply into the snow tamped down on the trails through the forest, and it takes far more energy to hike along under those circumstances. The creek at the bottom of the ravine is full and running furiously; two days of rain will do that.

There was a light foggy mist rising from the creek, giving a somewhat opaque albeit sheer look to the atmosphere. Jackie and Jillie were happy as always to be out in the forest, gorging themselves on newly-released aromas, some innocent enough and others quite, quite rude. One important thing we are guaranteed when we ramble through the forest, is peace of mind and scenic vistas to revel in, throughout our wonderful natural surroundings.

The amusing thing is that our street is habitually so poorly plowed by the municipality following snow storms that it is relatively more comfortable and easier making our way through the forest trails than it is wading up our street to access the entrance to the ravine. Whether driving or walking on the street one is forced to wallow in thick layers of ice and snow interspersed with rain-freed areas now presenting themselves as akin to little lakes.

Daisy may be a mere sprite of a dog as a Maltese, but she has the confidence in self assurance shared by many tiny dogs. She is never intimidated in the presence of larger dogs -- and all and any dogs are larger than she is. The very sight of her trotting confidently along the forest trails is a refreshing vision of minuscule sweetness.

She has no hesitation whatever in approaching a gaggle of dogs, excitable and physical; she just simply and calmly enters their orbit and they seem to place a temporary spur on their antics. She is so tiny that when Jackie  -- a small dog himself, stands in front of her, you can barely see Daisy. You get the true picture when one as large as a Portuguese Water Dog or even a 7-month-old Australian Shepherd pup stands beside her.

It seems that we are to expect a spate of unusual temperature moderation, much milder than we have any right to expect at this time of year; far too early for spring to begin arriving yet. We can begin musing about spring's arrival in mid- to late-March.

The past several days appear to have approached the initial stages of a forecasted spell of double-digit-plus, however. That, plus that this is a holiday week-end, appears to have brought quite a few people and their companion animals out to the forest for enjoyable treks along the trails.

As for the trails themselves, in days previous treacherously icy, we note with some measure of relief that they're nowhere near as slippery though it's never a good idea to let down your guard since invariably there will be patches where microclimates even within the ravine -- particularly within the low-lying areas -- where temperatures are inclined to remain more frigid, translate to icy patches.

Irrespective of which, we chalked up another perfect Sunday stroll for us and for our two little charges, Jackie and Jillie. Plenty of other dogs to come across and socialize with before moving on to complete our circuit along the network of trails throughout the ravine for the day.

We had a pleasant Saturday that included our usual daily ravine walk in the forest with our two little dogs, yesterday.

Our oldest son, one quarter part of a Medieval music ensemble along with his wife, told us last night that they had performed earlier in the day at a Toronto church where they have given performances over the years. We had a pleasant evening including a half-hour of dancing, thanks to Radio Canada airing a regular Saturday night program of music dating from the 1940s, 50s and 60s. Much later in the evening we watched a Russian film, Leviathan. We much prefer, if we can get them at the public library, just about any films that haven't been produced in Hollywood.

This was a grim film which included some typical Hollywood fare of human degradation, violence, corruption and societal dysfunction, but did so from the perspective of a more mature lens. Taking place in northern Russia, present-day Russia, its revelations do nothing to promote respect for a society mired in hypocrisy, helplessness against the state, the grip of religious sanctimony, institutionalized graft and corruption rife in all arms of government including a corrupted judiciary and police forces aiding politicians in their immoral fraudulence.

It is spiked with the drama of interpersonal relations that become more complex as the film progresses. Beautifully filmed, both under- and overstated in one way or another, it amply demonstrates the hopelessness of ordinary civilians fighting for their rights against a nefarious bureaucracy established to benefit ideologues and base establishment figures irrespective of their crimes who manage instead of themselves facing due justice, to skilfully and without an iota of conscience, twist events to establish false evidence against the innocent, ultimately incarcerated to sweep the way clean for evil to prevail.

Morning brought an infinitely more cheerful attitude to our sensibilities with a bright, sunny day. And since it's Sunday, we had a nice, long breakfast of melons, bananas, tea/coffee, and pancakes and tiny sausages. Jillie was feeling under the weather and missed having the usual Sunday morning treats which Jackie was more than happy to gobble up. We had some leftover pancakes and because we'd watched out the patio doors during breakfast while a resident red squirrel sauntered onto the deck this morning, two of the pancakes were left out for it, while another several were placed on a chair sitting on the porch at the front of the house.

It seems our local raccoons have taken a break from hibernation. They have been ransacking the compost bins for anything edible, but everything there is clumped and fast frozen, so last night my husband put out an assortment of bread pieces and this morning none were left. As for the pancakes on the porch, I watched as a tiny red squirrel turned one of the pancakes, about a quarter its own size, over repeatedly in its clever little paws, licking the butter off it, then racing off with it.

The tiny creature returned and made an effort to take both remaining pancakes with it, but couldn't handle more than one at a time. 

My husband and I are both devoted readers. We always have been. From the time we were children together, at age fourteen we would go along to the local library, among other destinations of mutual interest. We did a lot of walking together, we went to area greenspaces whenever we could. When we were first married sixty-three years ago we began to collect books; not many, however, since we hadn't much of an income to spare back then.

Our children and our grandchild have a love of reading, none of the four more so than our granddaughter who venerates books, cannot tolerate mishandling them, like her uncle, our oldest son. At the present time I am reading a book whose physical condition would make her shudder; an old paperback that has seen much better days long before we acquired it, and I've no idea when it joined our collection. My husband now and again browses through our books looking for 'something to read'. I never have any problems like that, there are so many books I intend to read that reside within our extensive collection, many of which were acquired second-hand.

Both our night tables are stacked with books. Mine tend to be historical, biographical and white-adventure books in Arctic exploration and Himalayan mountain-climbing, interests my husband shares, though his night-time reading is mostly confined to detective novels alongside French and British classic literature. We've bookshelves all over the house. I believe that the weight of the books in our house would easily balance against the weight of our household furniture.

After he finished reading My Childhood by Maxim Gorky, my husband informed me of some details and recommended I not read it, because he found the brutality in it experienced by the child that Gorky was, so upsetting. But I'm reading it and am glad about that, because it's a fascinating read, one that combines moments of tenderness as a spark of humanity within the larger context of uncivil violence.

The mature and introspective Gorky wrote from the child's lens in his then-adult eye of his experiences growing up in his grandfather's household when his widowed mother left him there, going off herself to live elsewhere because her paternal home was anathema to her spirit and her humanity. Gorky never appears to blame his mother for abandoning him and possibly this is because her mother, his grandmother, became his spiritual angel.

The child's-eye remembrance and account of a dysfunctional family where the inheritance of psychotic violence endowed the psychopathy of his two uncles is stark and  horribly disturbing in the context of everyday life in mid-19th Century Russia. Gorky's family did not live in abject poverty; his grandfather and his two uncles were artisans, dyers of cloth, living in a then-moderate-income enclave of others producing goods required by society. They had reasonable accommodations however cramped, and ample food. What they lacked lamentably was compassion for one another, although Gorky's grandmother attempted to make amends. She could do nothing to protect her two daughters-in-law from the intimate rampages of her disturbingly feckless sons who ended up killing their wives. There were no repercussions save those of conscience.

Maxim Gorky wrote of his experiences, his impressions of his formative years' exposure to this dreadful family situation. His dreaded grandfather, capable of random moments of tenderness, but who inflicted vicious thrashings upon all his grandchildren on a weekly basis, sometimes leaving Gorky then a child of 4, 5, 6 years of age deathly ill and bed-ridden for weeks while recovering is described as a merciless tyrant. By the time the child, impressionable, and forever scarred by life with his extended family was eight years old, his grandfather declared him persona non grata in their broken household, sending him into the world to fend for himself.

My mother's family lived in Russia's Pale of Settlement, an especial geography set aside for Jews as, presumably, punishment for being Jews. Which gave her exposure to various cross-cultural and -language streams. At the time of the Russian Revolution, her older brothers, supporters of the socialist Red Army, were in the crosshairs of the imperial White Army. Her life would have been forfeit and so would her future children's had an uncle who had emigrated and lived at that time in the United States not sponsored her and her sisters' passage to Canada.

Yesterday dawn emerged from a moderate temperature night to rain showers. Good, we thought, it will wash away some of the snow. And perhaps it did before it eventually stopped. The snowpack in the ravine had softened, and the glazing of ice over the trails was replaced with a little bit of snow mush. Our street, which hadn't been plowed by the municipality after the last snowfall, was an absolute mess. It seemed more difficult plodding up the street the brief few minutes it takes to achieve the ravine trailhead than our hour's ramble through the woods.

This morning the day was heralded with snow flurries sent in every direction by a sharp wind whipping the snow into a frenzy of movement. We knew that the temperature was destined to drop overnight, but not by much, last night. This evening it will be different, it will descend to -18C. We had anticipated that the easy going on the snow-and-ice-softened trails of yesterday would be transformed by this afternoon, and we were right.

The trails have, once again, become a challenge to negotiate. Which explains more than adequately why we briefly saw at a distance only one other person out there, and Benjie with her, the amiable large Belgian sheep dog who likes to get close up and personal.

Yesterday our trail walk was an interesting exercise in forest gloom with a heavy cloud cover interspersed with brief periods of beaming light, when the sun emerged, a giant fiery gaseous ball of energy lighting the atmosphere with its vibrancy and increasing warmth. Today the sun was out full-time, so that made it very pleasant, but the wind, unusually sharp and biting, managed to make its way through much of the forest, making it appear colder than the -3C we were walking in.

Jackie and Jillie had no trouble negotiating the trails, running off trail into smaller  pathways made by larger dogs the previous day -- eager to see whether there was something they might be missing by emaining on the trail. Ascending and descending the hills called for a little caution on our part in recognition that the trails had indeed acquired yet again a layer of ice, so that even with our ice cleats strapped over our boots we found ourselves slipping.

Yesterday turned out such a perfect day, with a blazing sun in the wide, blue sky, shelter from the wind within the forest confines and a remarkable 4C degrees that neighbourhood dogs convinced their reluctant human companions to get out and enjoy it all. Jackie and Jillie had so many lively encounters with canine acquaintances it made for an extraordinarily satisfying ravine outing for them, and for us as well.

We came across Milly, a vibrantly lovely Golden Retriever first, and she exercises such good judgement in choosing to ignore the impudence with which Jillie greets her, by leaping toward her muzzle in a display of bad manners, one can only imagine how nice it would be if Jillie exercised some of Milly's  polite mannerisms.

That was followed by another meeting, this time with exuberant, ecstatic little Max, a miniature-size poodle mix, the bane of Jackie's existence because though they greet one another enthusiastically enough, Max, younger than Jackie, is inexhaustible in his determination to boss other dogs around, continually challenging Jackie to bouts of wrestling, the kind of acrobatics that Jackie is accustomed to engaging in with Jillie, but disinterested in doing so with a whippersnapper like Max.

The ice-slicked trails of tamped-down snow had responded to the elevated temperature so there was no more chance of slipping and sliding, making it infinitely more congenial forging along on the trails. That milder temperature also enables odours evidently delightful to dogs, to waft temptingly through the atmosphere, leading our little companions to explore, snout down in the heavy layers of accumulated, but dissolving snowpack.

Chase, white and brown, behind Jackie

And it wasn't long before we came across another of our acquaintances, Gord, who makes his living training and dog-walking. He had with him a small, really nicely conformed (possibly not pure-bred, making that feasible) bulldog and he promptly informed us that Chase was a rescue. He'd taken the muscular little dog into his care three months ago when its owner was preparing to 'put it down' because of its dangerously hostile behaviour.

Molly is the Yellow Lab in back

Then Gord showed us the still-remaining scars all over the little dog's body, top and underside; all symptoms of a horribly abused creature. Chase had been a handful for the first month, wary, mistrustful and prone to abrupt physical reaction. Since then he's come a long way. By the time we saw him yesterday, he was a changed animal, friendly, peaceful and quiet, anxious to please Gord, obviously now hugely dependent on him. Gord's long-time companion Molly, an amiable yellow Lab, quickly began to mentor Chase, and with her help healed the poor little creature's soul.

As we stood talking with Gord, others came along with their companions and before we knew it there was a concatenation of dogs, communicating with one another and no doubt in their own way giving assurances to each other, conveying their pleasure in the atmosphere of this perfect February day.