03.03.05 - 1:52 p.m.

Winter is holding on, but I don't mind. I enjoyed the snow yesterday, and since I'm mostly over the flu, I didn't mind shoveling the steps and the walk. I finally opened by last bag of salt - water softener salt, to be specific, purchased in a panic weeks ago when I was close to running out of regular salt the store was out of regular. It's a huge bag, 40 pounds of salt - enough to make me rich 2000 years ago, when salt was still essential and precious and profit-minded people the world over mined not silver or gold, but salt. I read somewhere that one of the Confederacy's major tactical mistakes in the Civil War (beyond, uh, the obvious bit where they seceded from the Union to protect slavery despite the fact that, uh, they had like, no industry and a smaller population and no navy and all those niggling details) was the decision not to defend the Kanawha saltworks more vigorously. There weren't many saltworks in the South - oh, at Tabasco maybe - and the lack of salt intensified the food supply crisis. Charleston hasn't been quite that important in anything, since. Oh, maybe in the 2004 election when it looked like the Democrats still had a chance of winning the state... but that's it. Nothing else!

It's such a bright day, a lovely day, blue skies, the bright, cold sun, cotton-wool clouds stretched across the roof of the valley. The hills are ugly and brown, of course - spring is still barely a promise - but the sky is never this blue in the summertime. The heat and humidity and pollution conspire to bleach the vibrant color from the sky and leave it dull, washed out, graywhite. I feel crisp and efficient on days like this - and I enjoy the cold, which isn't quite bitter, when it is accompanied by such bright loveliness. Part of me is itching to get outside and start tearing up the front beds, but the rest of me is far too lazy for that, and anyway, I think that digging up that blowsy climbing rose (which is infested with thorns - so many thorns that the brances look like they're afflicted some sort of weird, tumorous skin disease, which in turn reminds me of the woman with the weird, tumorous skin disease that I would sometimes see when I used to take the bus. I felt so sorry for her, but that combination of guilt and shame still didn't quell the awful, dead-bodies-on-display desire to stare and, simultaneously, look pointedly away. How awful to be trapped in skin like that, to be whoever you are inside your head and always, on the outside, just a sad, somewhat awful sight. How awful.) will be, uh, not so fun when I finally get around to it.

Even though the sun is out, I don't believe that it will get above freezing today - but I am still spending my lunch hour looking at plant catalogues online. I think I'm going to plan my front beds really well, and order those plants from a high-quality catalogue (like, uh, the one I'm looking at, which has "complete garden" packages that are too big for my front beds, but are nonetheless gorgeous and inspiring) so that I get absolutely exactly what I want. Right now, I think I'm going to put a pink and a blue hydrangea out front, along with delphinium, canterbury bells or hollyhocks, and maybe some coneflowers (which I love) and/or shasta daisies and possibly clustered bellflower or campanula.

I won't spend as much money on the backyard for this year, but I might plan a perennial bed or two and lay them out, or I might just go with whatever I'm inspired by at the garden center. I'm also going to do a kitchen herb garden in pots and planters on the back deck. I would love to get some flower boxes for the two front windows on the second floor, but I honestly have no clue how to mount them, and I would also have to move the window unit - which, though ugly, will be necessary in the high heat of midsummer, if I'm going to sleep in my bed and not on the floor in the dining room. Mom ordered some tomato plants for me, and a paulownia tomentosa, which was advertised in the Sunday paper. I saw the same ad (or a similar ad), which called the tree a "princess tree" and touted its fast growth and spring blossoms as selling points. Of course, I looked it up and read that it is an aggressive, invasive species native to China that grows rapidly in borderlands, especially in deciduous forests and in the areas between wild land and useable land and tolerates bad soil and can choke out native species, so I decided not to order it. Oh, those invasive, randy ornamental trees. Where is Planned Parenthood when you really need it? Do they make birth control pills for trees?

Gah. I don't think that I can refuse the gift, so I guess I'll plant it and maybe "accidentally" run over it with a lawn mower.

Or, alternatively, sheathe it in a giant, tree-sized plant condom.