Collage of rose, lettering and botanical tattoos

You will think I have lost my wits, but the rose came up at the bottom of the hill road, right where the council sprayed the verge in March. Nobody planted it. I found it on Tuesday with the bin lorry idling behind me, a single stem bent into a curl like a shepherd's crook, and a bloom at the top no bigger than a fist, grey in the morning light the way the old prints of your mother's garden are grey. I stood there with the shopping until the driver leaned out and asked whether I was lost.

I have been thinking about what Dad used to say, that a plant grows toward whatever is kind to it, not toward the sun. Nonsense, I told him, and he laughed and said, then why does the sunflower bother. I dug around the base with the trowel from the shed and found roots thin as cotton, reaching under the tarmac edge where the drain runs. They had been there longer than the bloom. Whoever dropped that seed had no idea it would survive a winter of grit and dog mess.

So I have put a jam jar of water on the windowsill and written the words from the back of your birthday card on a label: be kind to yourself. Silly, I know. But you told me last month you had stopped answering the phone to people who only wanted to hear you were fine. Ring me back. I will tell you how the stem is holding.

Love, Auntie Margaret