snow on hellebores, home

It was steel-gray this morning, and if I hadn't thought the better of it in this El Nino non-winter, I'd have guessed that it was about to snow. Impossible, I said aloud, but hey, that stuff descending from the hard-looking clouds certainly appeared to be the white stuff. And sure enough, it would soon become abundantly clear that we were actually bearing witness to snow squalls. The cause was the arrival of a cold front, the first of the year and a fierce one that would make the weather appear to be normal for early January. The snow didn't amount to much, but it did cover the leaf litter and the still-living foliage of such gamblers as the hellebores, which, as I'd noted earlier, had put forth blossoms. Before the temperature could plummet, I busied myself with covering the wishful-thinking plants with armloads of leafy mulch. I don't know if those potential blooms will survive the entire winter, but I hate to let dreams die. We'll just have to see if mulch will enable dreamers to prosper, sooner or later.