Botanical and crystal sleeve on arm

Winter quarters at Sallow Heath smell of wet canvas and paraffin, and the lions have been moved behind the feed shed so the village children can't stare at them through the fence. Mr Garrity says the big top won't go up again after the spring. He says it the way he talks about the weather, as though it was never anybody's doing. I have been packing the fernery wagon since Monday, which is slow work when every pane is older than I am.

You would laugh at what I have kept. The glass cutter's crystals from the old mirror act are still in their tin, forty-odd pieces of cut quartz the size of walnuts, and I can't bring myself to sell them to the man from Lewes who buys anything that sparkles. I wrap each one in a page of the handbill, so the Great Orlando goes into the crate face down, looking at nothing. The pink roses are Mother's. She rooted the cutting in a jam jar on the caravan step the summer you were born, and it has bloomed every June since, even through the coal strike and the year we were snowed in at Carlisle.

On Thursday a boy came up the lane on a bicycle with a letter from the bank. I read it twice, then went and sat among the ferns. Some of them are taller than I am, and they have grown through the copper pipes, so taking them out is like unpicking a knot someone else tied. I have decided I am not selling them. I am going to plant them in the churchyard beside Mother, where nobody will ask what a fern is doing in a graveyard in February.

Come home for Easter if you can. Bring nothing. I have a trunk of crystal and a box of roots that refuse to die, and I suspect that is the whole inheritance.

Your sister, Ada