Heart wreath with script quote on thigh

The forget-me-nots came up along the cart track the week after you left, all at once, as if they had been waiting for someone to notice them. Your mother says I should stop writing about flowers and tell you about the bank, but the bank can wait. Mr Pargeter has asked for the lease back on the orchard field, and I have told him what I told you: I will not sign until the bees are settled.

I took the old wreath frame down from the scullery wall this morning. You remember it, the heart-shaped willow hoop Grandmother bent every spring and filled with whatever the hedges gave her. She used to say a heart cannot be kept by anyone but its owner, which I thought was nonsense when I was nine and think now is the only sensible thing she ever told me. I wove blue flowers round it, daisies in orange as cheerful as marigolds, and one yellow bloom I could not name. Then I painted her sentence across the middle in the copperplate she taught us, the curls on the F and the long tail under the y. My hand shook at the end, and the last word slants downhill like a cart on ice.

Do not come home to fix it. I mean that kindly. Fall in love with yourself, the sentence says, and I have stopped laughing at it. You have spent three years sending me letters from the city apologising for the size of your life, and the frame is hung now above the kettle, where you will see it when you visit. Tell me what the city's flowers are called. I will write them into the margin.