It was almost a guarantee, if we gave it much thought beforehand, that since the morning dawned cool, dry and clear with full sun replacing the grouchy sky of yesterday, there would be plenty of other people and their companion dogs out on the forest trails today. Others were few and far between yesterday morning. We had a quiet, serene walk through all the trails, with no perceived challenges for Jackie and Jillie to move them to a barking chorus.

We dressed Jillie in her lighter harness, replacing the one that firmly restrains her when she struggles to run ahead to confront dogs she isn't familiar with. The lighter harness doesn't slip off Jackie, but it does Jillie. So today because the sun was full out, and the trees weren't dripping as they had been yesterday, we did come across others, those we know and those we don't. And Jillie wriggled and strained out of her harness.

A small black schnauzer, their size, decided that our two rascals would make perfect playmates. We've come across this little fellow before. He's young, still a puppy, and eager to play, running about happily everywhere. Innocently adorable, a perfect picture of immature joyfulness. Nothing fazes that little guy, who simply ignored our two and their bad manners, forgiving them instantly, generously offering them the opportunity to play with him.

Their playfulness, unfortunately fails to go beyond the tussles and games they share between themselves. Because each fulfills the needs of the other, they've never been receptive to invitations tendered by other dogs. What they do in becoming accustomed to the presence of others is simply relax around them, accepting that they're there, but unwilling to chase and tease. And when other dogs in their presence do indulge in playfulness, they seem to interpret it as threatening, as though the other dogs are in danger from one another, and someone should intervene to stop them before someone gets hurt.

They're most comfortable around the presence of dogs they know that are mature enough that they're not interested in physical interactions. Like Rex, the Rottweiler, who's getting on in years, and though curious about everything around him, no longer feels the need to indulge in vigorous games with other dogs. He just feels better lounging around. Older dogs do that to perfection.

When we were about halfway through our morning ramble, my husband suddenly suggested that we take our puppies off leash and 'see what happens'. Well, we know what happens, they have the freedom to rush ahead yapping fiercely when we begin to come abreast of someone else on the trail -- not people, other dogs -- and our concern is that they'll do that if they ever encounter a coyote, forcing the coyote to turn on them.

But we went ahead anyway and took them off leash. They hardly seemed to notice. But they did begin to distance themselves, trotting easily ahead of us, necessitating that we call them back to remain within sight and closer at hand. Truth is, it was extremely relaxing not having to manipulate a leash continually. Just to amble along, watching them, appreciating the landscape, chatting together.

And we ran into no difficulties. When we stopped now and again to chat briefly with people we know, they stop right beside us and wait patiently until we part company with our friends and continue our hike. Whether we'll revert to having them off leash as we did for so many years, only time and related experience will tell us. The constant coyote sightings narrated to us by others caused us to leash them to begin with, but those sightings have receded dramatically.

Our vigilance cannot be entirely set aside, but perhaps we can agree between us that as long as they now respond to our repeated reminders to them not to stray, to remain in sight and close by, we may work things out to everyone's satisfaction. It is imperative that they remain in close sight; we see many dogs left to wander unrestricted where they will, well out of sight of their human companions. That has never worked for us and it's hugely unlikely it ever might.

Just one thing after another. We're coping with the novel coronavirus, taking steps we know should protect us from transmission. Our lives have been complicated. Nothing -- at least most things society takes for granted -- is quite the same any more. But this is Canada. Where case numbers are relatively low in comparison to many other parts of the world. Including our neighbour to the south, grappling to try to get a grip on their contagion and the overwhelming number of deaths caused by COVID-19.

Our economy is in shatters, many people are unemployed, food banks require more help than ever to give assistance to people in dire straits. We are reminded daily of how delicately balanced our life on this planet can be. But, again this is Canada. We're well sheltered from the disasters that strike elsewhere. As in countries in conflict, countries threatened by natural disasters causing earthquakes, floods, volcanic action.

Lebanon yesterday, was put to another kind of test when its deep-sea port at Beirut was shattered by several explosions. There are people from all over the world who migrated from their countries of birth to emigrate to Canada to become citizens and raise their families here. But they remain lovingly loyal to the country of their heritage, returning there often to touch back with families still living there. "There are no words to describe what's happening now. It's horrific. I've never seen Lebanon like this in my life. It's worse than it was during the civil war", said Ahmad Arajil, president of the Lebanese Club of Ottawa.

"Most of my family is in Lebanon. Some of them were affected directly, their windows were shattered and their kids hospitalized. The hospitals aren't even able to take in the insane amount of wounded people. It's horrible." Yes, it is horrible. A country in a financial crisis, desperately trying to deal with a pandemic, an unstable government, the major governing share of which is an actual terrorist group outlawed by Western society and some countries in the Middle East. Lebanon has become Hezbollah.

That is the kind of insane instability that millions of people are forced to live with. A country that imports 80 percent of its food from abroad, and when an entirely avoidable catastrophe occurred with an explosion at a warehouse holding ammonium nitrate, buildings were levelled, a hundred people died, thousands wounded, and a storage unit containing 85 percent of the nation's wheat was destroyed.

For us, life though complicated by the everpresent threat of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, goes on. Predictable, familiar, and comforting. We are faced with innumerable little challenges throughout the course of every day and transcend them. Never or rarely are we confronted by a multiplicity of life-threatening circumstances coming at us from all directions.

The direction we took this morning was to take our usual morning passage into routine, led by Jackie and Jillie, our two little companion dogs, making our way into the forest for a leisurely ramble through woodland trails. The rain so recently stopped that it was continually falling from the foliage surrounding us. Thimbleberries picked as per usual, to whet our puppies' appetite for their breakfast that would follow on our return back home.

The copious rain from the frequent, unrelenting rainstorms and thunderstorms have stimulated the growth of various fungi and moulds, appearing now with greater frequency on tree trunks and decomposing, fallen trunks littering the forest floor. Some are colourful, looking like discarded orange peel, others are strangely architectural and grow in colonies. And there are the other fungi that come up as perfect mushrooms, beautifully shaped and multi-coloured.

Everything green looked as though it had been freshly lacquered. The forest was dark and it was still, but for the beautiful melodic notes of a cardinal . Every leaf emphasized its presence, dark, bright green and slicked with rain. And to our surprise, we came across a red baneberry shrub with most of its ripe red berries intact; a rarity this year in the woods where usually there are so many.

We passed by a familiar figure walking his black Lab, a dog that we never, ever see without his favourite bright orange stick held firmly in his mouth, no matter how long they're out, how far they delve into the forest. And finally, we wound up our circuit for the morning and headed back to street level to make our way home to the bright colourful welcome of our garden. Safe. Secure.

Our tame adventures. Venturing out into nature. There was a time when our ventures took us far and wide. We think about that, about what we've seen and experienced. Others do the same now. It's a great, wide world with much to see and do. A world that has suddenly collapsed, shrunk in comparison to the immensity it once offered. Countries have closed their borders. Even regions within countries have done that, anxious to ensure that other areas more plagued than they are with the novel coronavirus and its threats to human longevity remain as far distant as possible.

On the other hand, that needn't necessarily condition people whose love affair with nature beckons them to ignore that call. While public parks, playgrounds and social centres have all been closed for months, only recently beginning to relax exclusion, there have always remained natural areas that could be accessed by anyone wanting to take the trouble. We know how fortunate we are living in close proximity to a natural forest whose geology is such that it was simply too impractical to 'develop' into commercial and housing sites.

Instead, the ravine and its forested enclave were simply absorbed by the city, left intact for posterity. Much the way the gravitational force of a celestial black hole attracts whatever approaches close enough to the irresistible force of its pull and becomes absorbed into the unknowable centre of a force whose magnitude can only be guessed. The magnetic appeal of the woodlands is what attracts us irresistibly to the ravined forest nestled within the community in which we have the good fortune to live.

The wary trepidation of contracting COVID-19 ensures that those people who seek out the serenity and beauty of the forest trails, maintain social distancing. With good humour and grace. Ensuring also our confidence and comfort in visiting it daily, as we do, as many others do. This morning our ramble through the ravine was particularly invested in solitude for no one else was around and we roamed the trails with Jackie and Jillie in perfect peace and harmony with our surroundings.

Once again it rained last night. Once again we awoke to a dark morning, leaden skies overhead leaving us speculating whether we might be able to manage our usual circuit without the skies opening up and drenching us all. It was cool, and it was humid and the air shifted about in a light-to-medium wind. We stopped briefly to pick some berries for Jackie and Jillie before moving on and down into the ravine.

There is colour beyond the brilliant greens of a thoroughly-rain-washed forest. The beautiful bright pink of thistles blooming. The vibrant yellows of pilotweed growing with gay abandon. The deeper, darker pink of the Himalayan orchids embroidering a patch of the forest floor. And something that resembled spilled cream splashed generously over old pine needles alongside the trail. Not cream, but an odd fungal growth that appeared suddenly as fungi tends to do.

Yesterday we also had evening rain and morning rain and we wore raincoats to catch the light drizzle we hiked through roaming on the trails. But yesterday the sun emerged when we were halfway through our circuit, so we tramped the trails half in dusky overcast and half in partially sunlit trails. Not so this morning. While the rain held off for the period that we were out, when we returned to street level and were approaching our house, drops began to fall.

Soon those drops were a growing deluge. Rain had begun in earnest, and there was only the occasional very brief lifting of its ferocity before it returned again to full-on spigot like a partially controlled waterfall. The day was destined to be dark and wet. Conditions that intensify exterior colour, making it brilliant and beyond beautiful.

There was a tornado alert for this area last evening, along with thunderstorm warnings. Earlier in the day a tornado had touched down close to Kingston, at Napanee. There have been eight tornadoes this year but nothing like the damage caused several years ago in a northwestern part of the city. Years ago a micro-tornado had ripped through the ravine, taking down a succession of elderly pine trees. The corpses, a decade on, still remind us, lying on the forest floor gradually covered over by vegetation, how grand they had once been with their great gnarly thick trunks and piercingly-green needles.

The thunderstorms struck in the wee hours of the night, leaving behind generous evidence of just how copious the rainfall had been. Augmenting the torrential rain of the afternoon. We intended to set out for the ravine before breakfast as usual, but the sky was rife with dark clouds clamping us into another rainy day, as we read the symptoms. We decided we'd wait until one particularly belligerent and bruised-looking cloud passed, to weigh our further options.

And then we just got impatient and decided we'd go out and that was that. In the meantime, the cloud drifted on, no doubt dropping its load of moisture somewhere on the trajectory of its skyborne journey but not in our direct vicinity. All the rain we've been having, soaking the landscape thoroughly, then drying surprisingly swiftly under the influence of the hot summer sun and emphatic winds have encouraged the presence of fungi.

For the past several days we've been seeing bright orange -- rather lurid in fact -- fungi appearing here and there on the forest floor. At times resembling orange rind, other times with a glistening appearance, looking quite like someone had lost their breakfast. Photographs fail to do justice to the fungi which appear to the naked eye both colour-appealing and shape-disgusting. And alongside the trails, thistles are flowering as well, with bright pink blooms, the bull thistles in particular.

The puzzle of the absence of apples on the wild apple trees as opposed to an abundance of berries on the thimbleberry and raspberry bushes baffles us. As does the absence of those bright red berry clusters typical of most summers' red baneberry shrubbery, strangely missing this year. We had seen a few intact and ripening specimens a month back, but they too are now gone. They're poisonous to humans but evidently not to all mammals, so possibly they've been eaten just as all the hazelnuts that we had seen ripening several months back are also now nowhere to be seen.

The clouds gradually dissipated, and the sun was free to begin warming the atmosphere and brightening the landscape. Although by afternoon we're supposed to be in an average summertime temperature zone, even 26C with full sun tends to be hot. So we were glad to have been able to get out with Jackie and Jillie in the morning, rather than setting out due to unsettled weather conditions, in the afternoon.

At home, the garden appeared vivaciously iridescent in the sun, all the greens vibrant and translucent in appearance, the sun seeming to set them afire with light. In the backyard I staked up a little tomato volunteer that had appeared a month ago and has since grown robustly in the garden. Where the seed came from that inspired the tomato plant to begin growing amongst the hostas, roses, clematis and Harlequin vines I'll never know. I'm awaiting some signs that it will soon begin flowering, it's certainly mature enough at this point.

More of those familiar old Tiger lilies have appeared here and there in the garden, separate and apart from our Day lily beds. I cannot ever recall planting them, but there they are, single plants, hale and beautiful in three different locations. Like the tomato plant, I consider them to represent 'volunteers' that just happened along, making themselves comfortable in the garden, not bothering anyone while adding to the general confused clutter and colour in the garden.

Last night, before bed when my husband took Jackie and Jillie out to the backyard, he called me out to have a look at the moon. The month's new moon, no less. The sky was almost clear after a rare no-rain day yesterday, there were some skimpy strings of white cloud, and there was the moon in all the grandeur it displays fully dressed. Above and to the right of the moon a bright star. Not a star, a planet, said he. Indeed, it's Saturn, the closest of the planets to be seen beside the August moon.

We knew that there would be rain the following day. Lots of it, since the 'chance' of rain was listed at 90%. So we weren't surprised to wake to a grey morning, unable to dispel the darkness of night thanks to a dense cloud cover. Which was steadily unleashing a light rain, leaving us to consider whether or not to launch ourselves into a ravine walk before breakfast, as usual.

We reasoned that the full  forest canopy would help keep us fairly dry, and we'd all wear rainjackets. Better early than making an attempt in the afternoon when the rain was destined to pick up strength and volume. So, suitably attired, off we went. Up our dusk-entrenched street, over to the ravine entrance where, looking into the forest interior the resemblance to a dark tunnel couldn't have been more apt.

But in there the patter of rain was notably reduced, so on we went, down the hillside into the ravine proper where we were surprised to see the low level of the water flowing through the creek, despite the rain. An odd little anomaly that we knew would be turned about by the end of the day. We were fairly surprised to see that a few others were out with their dogs. Larger dogs for the most part, and not geared out in rain gear since these are the rough-and-ready breeds more likely to head straight for the cooling waters of the creek even in winter before the freeze-up.

No one is inclined to stand around and talk. to everyone's relief, on such weather days. Waves and wry smiles more than suffice, as we pass, or see one another in the distance and continue on our way. Gayle, a long-time hiking companion who lives at the foot of our street came trundling by, umbrella in hand, shouting that she wished she'd gone out a tad earlier when the rain had been marginally lighter.

Although we were comfortable, and kept fairly dry given the circumstances, we decided that a shorter circuit would do us all very nicely this morning, rather than continuing on for the usual hour-and-a-half tramp through the trails. All the more so since as time passed the volume and strength of the rain was becoming more robust, though there were no complaints from either Jackie or Jillie, plodding along through small puddles.

The garden welcomed our return, its colours brilliantly lacquered, light from some source bouncing off the vegetation. Everything was getting a good soaking, the rain slanting directly toward the front of the house to penetrate the width of the porch, which doesn't happen very often. And then, in the afternoon, though there hadn't been any decline in the rain, it turned suddenly quite fierce.

The temperature slowly descended as well. In all, a dark, damp day. But the dark aspect and the pouring rain lend an impression of quiet comfort. And we enjoy watching the rain fall, deepening colours of the flowers even in the dusk-like atmosphere that prevails. And when the wind picked up and lashed a much heavier rain against both the back and the front of the house, it becomes hypnotically fascinating to watch such an increased volume lashing the windows, splashing down on the garden.

Apropos of bewilderment, the news that Walmart plans to charge food producers an extra surcharge of 6.25 percent of the cost of their goods sold online to 'help pay' for Walmart's projected multi-billion-dollar modernization of its own facilities, telling the producers that they'll benefit from the initiative ultimately in greater sales, I wonder why people even shop at such enterprises. The supermarket that we choose to shop at for our weekly groceries is large, well maintained, clean, stocks fresh produce and a wide array of comestibles. All at a really reasonable price. And they launch frequent product sales.

When on occasion we drop by other supermarkets their upgraded aisle and shelving glitz and even wider selection of foodstuffs -- mostly pre-prepared and highly processed - is mind-boggling and distracting from the choice of whole foods. No matter whether it's produce or dairy or meats or household cleaning products there isn't one item on those upgraded shelves and refrigerated units that isn't considerably more costly than the very same products we select at the supermarket we shop at. So why people generally tend to choose these glittering emporiums with their focus on processed and non-consumable items is beyond our ken; satisfied in paying a premium price for them as well.

That's the humdrum world of shopping to stock our pantries to keep ourselves well nourished. That other world that we inhabit with all the good fortune at our disposal, is one where those same bodies that require daily infusions of good nutritious food, also have a need to be exposed to clean air, an interesting landscape for the eyes to drink in, and a geological environmental challenge exposing us to healthful exercise opportunities.  Distractions as well as healthy occupations all the more necessary during this time of COVID lockdown and its after-effects. Which is just what we indulged in this morning. At a later hour than is normal for us, setting out at 9:00 a.m.

Our earlier morning outings mean we come across fewer people. But today also being a Saturday explains in good part why it is that at certain crossroads where trails meet and diverge, there were actually scenes resembling 'crowds', as people politely waited, stepping aside to give ample room for others to pass. A lot of unfamiliar faces to be sure. And some well known to us.

For the most part, happily, we enjoyed the privilege of tramping through the trails unobstructed by the presence of others. Our friend Suzy, who doe her Tai Ch'i exercises every morning down at one of the bridges fording the creek before setting off on her own morning trek through the trails, was one of those old friends. Another who walks an elderly Rottweiler brought us up to date on the problems being experienced with hip displacement and his discovery, thanks to a mutual acquaintance of ours, of the good sense of making an hour-and-a-half trip across the border into New York State at Plattsburgh to visit the Village Veterinarian hospital.

The prices charged for surgery at Canadian veterinary hospitals are astronomical. The Plattsburgh  hospital charges reasonable fees, and counts many Ontario residents among their satisfied clients. They're a caring bunch of professionals who know their profession and its clients' needs well. For surgery for Jackie and Jillie when they were still pups and we had them spayed/neutered that's where we went. Our regular veterinarian services we rely on are located much closer to home.