Turning On A Dime

The weather in this country can turn on a dime. Certainly in the Ottawa area it can and it does, regularly. Two days ago, as an example, it was cool enough to require that we wear jackets and even gloves on our usual daily hike in the ravine. Yesterday it was short-sleeved tops and shorts, and even then we were extremely warm, the humidity was oppressive. And today? As the sage says, don't ask. But since you did, today we bounced right back to the cold again; lined jackets.

In between, though, there occurred an interesting weather phenomenon. Yesterday was very warm, unseasonably so, at 28 centigrade. Had the sun been full out all day it would have seemed even hotter, if that was at all possible, since the high humidity had its enervating effect, plus the heat. The sky was full of grey ragged clouds that parted occasionally long enough for the sun to blaze through for brief, blessedly-brief periods.

It seemed peculiar beyond belief, that two evenings before the night-time temperature had plunged to minus-4 degrees, and gave us a cold morning and a slightly less cold day. The night after and again the following night we were able to keep our bedroom windows - we had to keep our bedroom windows - wide open for fresh air lest we suffocate in the accumulated heat of the day, suffusing our home.

Yesterday it was so warm, our little dogs weren't able to stay out for long periods of time. I'd taken them out to the backyard after our ravine walk, to give them long-overdue haircuts. It seemed somehow surreal, being able to do that while the gardens are still entrenched in spring-recovery mode. But, sitting on the grass, there were ants, stumbling brazenly over my bare legs as I trimmed our two poodles.

Soon as she was aware I was finished snipping, the older one insisted on being let back inside, promptly. This is an occasional ordeal that I impose upon her, snipping her Pomeranian-Poodle profile back to a semblance of neatness. During which time she resists with all her conniving cleverness. Pointless, since I'm accustomed to it, but in the process both she and I become pantingly irritated.

Once she's back in the house and I go back to where I've set up my al fresco hair-design-studio there he is, the dutiful, biddable younger one; male, of course. He has the eminent good sense to snooze off while I've got him on his back, snipping away - his face, chest, paws, legs. Then she gets her reward for behaving abominably since she adores being bathed. And he receives his punishment for behaving so well, because he detests being immersed in water.

A few hours later the sun had exercised all its options for the day and dark cloud formations took possession of the sky. They were angry, ragged-looking clouds, moving quickly, only to be replaced by darker, moodier-appearing clouds, prefacing some additional alterations in our atmosphere. And just as we might have suspected, the wind began imposing itself aggressively, blowing up that proverbial storm.

No thunder, no lightning, just all-of-a-sudden drenching, downpour, flapping against the windows, sending us flying upstairs to bang the windows shut up there. Thoughts turned to other things, and we more or less ignored the weather raging out there. The next morning's newspapers brought us up to snuff on all that; power lines out, trees uprooted, roofs sailing off toward the nearest large body of water.

And this time when we entered the ravine for our walk, we wore jackets again. It was cool, and remained moderately windy. Things had changed. At least in some parts of the ravine. There were two sizeable bank collapses on the near side of the creek, taking fair-sized trees with them, settling them on the creek bottom, or given the larger size of some of the trees,flinging them across to the opposite side of the creek.

Another fifteen minutes of trekking brought us to the scene of a huge old pine that had been ringed with gaping Pileated woodpecker intrusions - downed from its stolid perch to crash its length across another bowl of earth, coming to ground precisely where one of the rustic bridges - gapping the ravine it grew within - invited the hiker's first tread. There the tree lay, majestic still, but broken, piteous in its hideous plight.

One day, one hour, one moment away from the stalwart sentinel that it has been for generations, reduced to a fallen giant; a totem of nature's splendour on the one hand, her terrible destructiveness on the other. And, as we continued to pick our way across the bridge, we could see in the forested area before us the sight of other stark-white and broken trunks, the luxurious green boughs of the pines scattered, silent witness to the disaster that befell the night before.

Another ten-minute trek and there, and there, and there, additional casualties; great pines that had withstood the test of whatever inclemencies nature had thrown their way, succumbed to this one, brief but powerful symbol of her disposal of her kingdom. Hers the glory, the might and the right. There is no wrong in nature; simply outcomes.

Nature the powerful, all other things within her kingdom, living or simply existing as inert objects, hers to dispose of as she will.