A hard freeze is scheduled for tonight. My tender plants have been brought safely indoors, but I'm crossing my fingers tonight in the hopes that my irises—so perilously close to blooming—will not be terribly stunted by this last freeze. I'm hoping to get a few good closeup shots of the blooms to use as a potential thematic idea for domesticat, and I'd prefer not to have to wait another year.

Assuming the weather warms appropriately, I'll be doing a lot of work in the garden tomorrow afternoon. I need to prune our existing crepe myrtles and get a couple of the new ones planted. This will be entertaining—I've never been great at manhandling shovels and dirt, especially when packed Alabama red clay is concerned. Time to learn, it seems.If my life ever had a theme, I believe it would read thus: "Things need doing. Guess I'd better get to it, hm?"

I brought my most tender plants inside tonight with a bit of joy—my sage plants are recovering! Since I spent a good portion of December and January ill (recap: stomach flu, strep throat, cold, even worse stomach flu), I lost most of the plants I'd tended for months. My airplane plant and hosta were badly damaged, but are recovering. I lost around twelve thyme plants (saving only two), my gorgeous rosemary plant and catnip plant, and my sage plants got the plant equivalent of a kick in the teeth.

Since that time, I've been trying to baby the tiny little sage plants as much as possible, in the hopes that they'd pull through. Like the human heart, they seem to bounce back—albeit slowly—from the severest of trials. Being sick for so long was demoralizing in and of itself, but getting well and realizing that I'd lost most of my plants truly made me sad. I'm taking what victories I can out of this.