Winter in Texas isn’t so bad. While photos of houses trapped behind drifts of snow and stories of school closings populate my news feed, we come off a weekend in which people strolled by the lake in t-shirts. But sometimes the cold finds us, and I’ll mark this winter in my mind by the walk I took with friends from Colorado before work one morning. It was 23 degrees and the air was crystalline. We paced the boardwalk almost alone, most people driven inside by the cold. It was hard to describe how rare it was to people who live with the cold all winter. I felt apologetic that the weather hadn’t cooperated for them, and a little thrilled that it offered us such an extreme. The walk to work and back on Monday was more typical of winter here. Chilly, but not frigid. The sky gray, the leafless trees befitting the season. It won’t be long before the primrose jasmine are a tumble of yellow again. And the century plants standing sculptural in gardens keep their noble gray-green no matter the temps.

February 2, 2015