Winter Slumber

It's cold here on California's Central Coast. Not the bone chilling cold you'd find in someplace like Minnesota, but since life is not lived in the comparative, being cold is just a plain shock to your system. We are blessed here with mild temperatures most of the year, so when the cold and freezing temperatures hit, it always takes me by surprise. 
  Once I get over my astonishment that our Indian Summer is behind us and figure out where I left my boots, scarf, gloves, heavy coat and wool cap from last winter, I'm ready for some cold, even freezing, days and nights. 
   We still have plants in the ground now, mostly hearty herbs, but even they need some care and attention when temperatures drop below freezing. So we bundle them up, wrap them in frost gear, swath them in blankets so they survive the cold too. 
  Winter in the garden is, for me, a time of reflection. Seasons. Cycles. Perennials. Annuals. Tides. Moon phases. Sunrises. Sunsets. 
   All of nature is in harmony. Out of the dark, cold winter will come life in the bloom of spring, thriving through the warmth of summer, fading in fall's ebbing and then a final slumber in winter once again.
   Only to begin again.

"As long as the earth endures, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night will never cease.” Genesis 8:22