Cold

What do you do when it's -1 degrees Fahrenheit?

You read about Wildflowers, of course. 

                       

An Artic Blast is affecting much of the East and South thus week. So it's the perfect time to read or reread Nature books. 

Besides the one above, I also have on my desk:

Blue Ridge Nature Journal:: Reflections on the Appalachian Mountains in Essays and Art by George Ellison

and

Orchid Fever: A Horticultural Tale of Love, Lust, and Lunacy by Eric Hansen

Those three new ones plus browsing through Bentley's Native Orchids of the Southern Appalachian Mountains and Frederick W. Case’s Trilliums should occupy me for quite awhile. 

 Hansen's essays include his classic account of traveling to Turkey to find an ice cream made of local native orchid root.  

So, bitter cold is not all bad. 

Ode to the West Wind Percy Bysshe Shelley O WILD West Wind, thou breath of Autumn's being— Thou from whose unseen presence the leaves dead Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing, Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red, Pestilence-stricken multitudes!—O thou Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed The wingèd seeds, where they lie cold and low, Each like a corpse within its grave, until Thine azure sister of the Spring shall blow Her clarion o'er the dreaming earth, and fill (Driving sweet buds like flocks to feed in air) With living hues and odours plain and hill— Wild Spirit, which art moving everywhere— Destroyer and Preserver—hear, O hear!

...... If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind? Winter is the season in which people try to keep the house as warm as it was in the summer, when they complained about the heat. ~Author Unknown