By Kylee Baumle

Holidays are over, real winter has set in and it doesn’t take long before I tire of it. I look wistfully through my pictures of the garden that were taken in warmer days, at the daffodils, the irises, the Black-eyed Susans. I remember how the sun felt on my face and how I would shut my eyes and attempt to commit that feeling to memory, so that I could conjure it up on the coldest days of the winter season yet to come.

It doesn’t work (it never does) but I will keep doing it, hoping one day I really can feel the stored memory. Hope springs eternal. Now if spring would just do the same! But, there are other winter-defying tricks I’ve got up my sleeve.