Floral tattoo in a diamond on a thigh

The frost has held the fen for nine days now, and Dad says the bulbs in the far cold frame will stay asleep until the thaw, though I have been checking them every morning with a torch like a nurse. Mum's old paper drawing of the Madonna lilies is still pinned above the potting bench. You remember the one, the flowers gone soft at the edges where the damp got into the folder. I have been copying it in pencil, one stem at a time, because the seed man from Spalding wants a card for the packets and wants the petals shaded grey, not left white, so they look as if they have been breathed on.

Tuesday he came out in a van with the heater running and stood in the yard looking at my drawings as though they owed him money. He said the lilies were too pretty to sell. Then he tapped the page where I had boxed the bunch in dots, a little diamond of ink points to keep the flowers from wandering off the paper, and said that was the bit he liked. I did not tell him I had taken the idea from the string-and-peg lines Dad uses to mark where each bulb goes, twelve inches apart, before the ground is turned.

Last night the wind dropped and the sky went clear and hard. I walked out to the far frame with the torch and saw the first green tip pushing through the sacking, pale as a fingernail. I knelt in the mud and did not move until my knees ached. Nothing about it was finished, and that was the point.

Write back soon. Bring the good pencils when you come at Easter, and tell Dad the stove wants coal, not wishing.

Love, Jo