Lotus and spiral on an ankle

The rain has not let up since Tuesday, and the stall under the iron canopy at Hollins Market smells of wet cardboard and the bitter green of the bulbs I sell by the bucket. You asked in your last letter whether I still bother with the lotus stock now that nobody in Bristol wants anything they cannot put in a microwave. I do. Mr Okafor from the herbalist's across the aisle bought forty seed pods on Thursday and paid in coins he had counted twice, and he told me his mother kept one in a jar of river water on the windowsill for thirty years.

The spiral is what sells, though. People stand at the trestle with their collars up and trace the curl of the fiddlehead ferns with a fingertip, then ask if I can draw it for them on a scrap of paper. I always do. Last Saturday a young man asked me to sketch the whole plant so he could take it to a shop on the high street, and I drew him the lotus rising out of a single unwinding tendril, the way the old woman who taught me drew it on the back of my order book. He said it was the only thing he had ever wanted put on him, then laughed at himself and said he would probably change his mind by spring.

I hope he doesn't. Some things ought to keep their shape. I have kept the old order book in the tin under the till, with the sketch folded into it, and when the weather turns I will bring it round to you on the bus.

Love, Maud