Lotus flower with swirling stem on upper back

Nobody put a lotus in that pond. A bargeman's daughter from Hull carried a dried seedhead in her coat pocket the winter the canal froze, and she pressed it into the silt under the willows because she said a thing that had come so far ought to have somewhere to sleep. Her name was Edith Sowerby. She married my great uncle Walt for his cider and his temper, in that order.

Through January the pond was a sheet of grey glass. Walt cracked a hole in it each morning with the hay fork so the ewes could drink, and each morning he swore the seeds were dead. Under that ice, though, a stem was coiling up through the black mud, slow as a fern, curling at the top like a question mark somebody had bent with pliers. You could see it if you knelt on the bank with a torch and kept your breath off the glass.

Then the thaw came early one March. Walt went down with his fork and his hat and found the stem standing clear of the water, bent over at the end in one long sweeping loop, with nothing on top of it at all. Edith had died the week before. He never said what he thought the flower was for. He only stood there with the fork over his shoulder until the ewes began to bleat behind him. Next July it opened, one white cup on the still water, and if you're quiet now I'll tell you what he did with the first petal.