Just when I'd thought—and worse, written in a weekly column that reaches perhaps 100,000 readers—that winter was over, it comes roaring back with cold that is astonishingly fierce and deep. The temperature bottomed out this morning at 9 degrees, and with gale-force winds howling, the "feel-like" reading was more in the realm of 20 below. I kept the stove going full tilt, and when I forced myself outside in the early afternoon to walk, the temperature was still well below freezing: a situation that the local Rhododendrons made eminently clear. Rhododendrons, of course, are evergreens, and to survive the worst that winter dishes out, the leaves have evolved a strategy known as thermonasty: to minimize water loss and the amount of surface area exposed to the chill, the foliage rolls tighter and tighter as the temperature drops. Here they are at about 25, and they'll get quite a bit tighter as the night comes on with truly bone-chilling weather in the forecast. Thermonastically, they'll get through this meteorological insult, none the worse for the experience. So, I suppose, will I.