Winter Waning Moon of Long Nights
As Bilbo said, I have been there and back again. Up here in the land of the midnight hobbit it remains cold, -7 now at noon. On days when the high is below zero you know for sure you live in a cold part of the world.
I can look out the window of this room though and see beds where daffodils and tulips, iris and dicentra, liguria and lilies lie, apparently dead, but actually taking a long winter’s sabbatical from photosynthesis. Their presence, more than anything else, convinces me that the blooms of yesteryear are not figments of a hypothermic crisis, but rather the wonder they are.
The deep cold does not stop life here. There were many folks at at the grocery store, a normal crowd for a Saturday. An active snow storm, a severe one, can cause folks to stock up and sit tight, but the cold is part of the territory. You deal with it, much as I assume the Bedouin do the heat.
