Lily flower design on a curling stem

The tiger lily by the orchard gate opened on Thursday, a full fortnight after the last plums came off the ladders, and Mr Haskett has been walking past it with his hat pulled low as if it had insulted him. I counted six flowers on the stem before I went in to supper. The petals are the colour of weak tea and freckled all over like a thrush's egg, and the middle of each bloom is a wild little arrangement: six stamens bent outwards like wire, each one dusted orange, and the stigma standing up at the centre like a tiny green finger.

I know you will say I am making a fuss over a weed. But it was your bulb. You put it in the ground the autumn before you left, wrapped in a twist of newspaper with the date pencilled on the side, and told me it would sulk for a year before it did anything. I did not believe you. I forgot it entirely until the frost went out of the soil and a green scroll pushed up beside the wall, curled at the tip like a fiddlehead, and I thought, that is Nell being clever again.

The stems are the odd part. Two leaves have coiled at the base like the ends of a bishop's crook, and they rattle when the wind comes up off the orchard. Mr Haskett says a lily flowering this late is a bad omen for the apple crop. I told him the apples have been ripe for a month and nobody has picked them, so he can take his omen up the ladder himself.

I have not cut it and I will not. Come home at Michaelmas if you can, and bring the newspaper. I want to see the date you wrote on it, and then I want you to tell me what you were hoping for, because I think it has come up exactly where you meant it to.

Yours, Ivy