TWO DOLLAR TREATS...

I was at WalMart today.  The place is cleared out and aleady showing major signs of Valentine's Day pressure to buy chocolates, stuffed animals, fancy pants pajamas and anything else that can have a heart stamped on it.

Not interested in that--yet.  Just wanted to get the soap, eye drops and mundane items I needed.  But, I thought it wouldn't hurt to walk all the way to the opposite end of the store and check out what they had in the garden department. This is the time of year when green house plants start showing up.  I need some replacements

 Black thumb that I have, some of my favorite little friends didn't make it to a new year.  We had a lot of warmer weather for way longer than usual.  That kind of screwed up the temperature in the house.  One trip I would come back and my plants would be drooping because I hadn't watered them enough before I left  in order for them to survive in the still warm days of October and November.   Then I would monitor the plants and make sure I watered them especially well before going on another trip--only to come home and find out that I had actually drowned them.  It was a see-saw like that for several weeks.  Finally, most of them succumbed to the "black thumb death".  I cannot win!

So, there went the delicate ferns, some of the really unusual cacti, the miniature poinsettia plants I got last Christmas--those two were doing soooo well after I had pruned them, nurtured them, and let them begin all over again.  Gone.  Gone.  Gone.  It was like I had lost some of my best friends.

But there, just inside the glass doors to the garden department at WalMart--and almost all alone in that now empty and cavernous area of the store--a whole display of cacti.  I'm not interested in those bigger yukky desert blobs that look like barrels or stumps or paddles all with gaudy singular blossoms poking out from  needle-like things that prick fingers, toes, and dog feet if you get too close.  We had those in the backyard at the Secrest Court house.  D.R. could tell you a thing or two about needling.

                                                

However, on the bottom of that display was a huge tray, maybe 48, tiny little cactus plants in pots barely 1.5 inches across and maybe 2 inches deep.  Nothing fancier than the basic Mother Hen and Chicks, and the other standards--no "String of Pearls" or the wonderful one that looked like a stalagmite which I managed to drown.  No, these were mini miniatures, each complete with a cellophane sheaf encasing it just like a bouquet of flowers comes from the florist.  Rainbow Mix from Rocket Farms in Half Moon Bay, California, they cost just two dollars each.  I bought five and a small clay saucer to showcase three of them in my kitchen window.

It might have been all of 5 frigid degrees outside, but I walked out of WalMart with a smile on my face that would melt an iceberg. 

It's the little things.....