The almond blossoms are falling petal by petal into the gutter, spiky clumps of green leaves are poking through, and it feels like a late commentary on Valentine’s day. Last week, a coworker qualified her praise of the cherry blossoms by saying it’s a girly thing to notice. Therefore I overstated my love for the flowers of this time of year, and this in turn led her, as if she were this week’s storm washing the first February petals down the gutters, to the topic of the cottonwood cottons that in summer clog the air and everything else. She spoke as if the cottons were a consequence of the flowers. Effusions of pink flowers could not be qualified enough, perhaps because they last for such a short time, and their beauty can’t be counted upon. At the time I was reading The Name of the Rose, in which a Catholic monk writes of “the female body, that great sink of the sins of the flesh.” Our conversation seemed not that far from the monks’ tremulous, witch-burning notion of women, or at least equally troubled by the pleasures of the senses. There could be no statement where the season’s flowers were concerned, only overstatement and qualification, excess and austerity.