Rockland Community College is a campus for all seasons and has a special beauty each time of the year. Although the winter of 2014 is bitterly cold, as the above photo shows, the landscape glistens in the snow and ice. RCC is truly a winter wonderland. My other vision of winter is quite different: a paradox, a metaphor, “a tale as old as time.” Each year a special friend at RCC gives me an amaryllis bulb*, packaged for the holiday season with instructions for planting. Sometime between Christmas and New Year’s I dutifully put the bulb in the soil mix and add warm water as instructed. Then, lo, in a few days a miracle appears: the bulb begins to sprout green stalks and a hard green bean-like blossom emerges. And over the next few weeks, in my sunniest window the shoots of the plant grow strong and straight and reach for the sun. Amazingly, the hard green blossom begins to reveal the red, and within a month a beautiful amaryllis flower appears like the one shown below....