Lotus with Namaste verse

The lotus came up in the lock pool again this morning, three weeks earlier than last year, which Mr Okonedo says is the water being kinder after the wet spring. I went down before the boats were moving and stood on the coping stone with my tea going cold. The leaves lie flat on the surface like dinner plates somebody has forgotten to clear, and then the buds lift out of the brown water, pointed and shut tight, and by seven they have opened into those black-edged cups that look as if they were cut from card.

You will remember the card. Dennis left it on the lock-keeper's hut windowsill the week before he went back down to Chesterfield, pinned under a stone with a bit of rope tied round it. Printed words under a picture of a flower, something about honouring the place in you that is the same in me. I thought it was the sort of thing the hospice ladies pin up. Then I read it again on a wet Tuesday and it was the only thing in the hut that made sense.

Dennis never said where the seed came from, only that his sister had carried it home in a biscuit tin from somewhere hot, and that it had sat in a kitchen drawer for eleven years before he could bring himself to plant it. I have not asked him for more. Some things are better left in the water.

Come up at the August bank holiday. I will leave the gate unbolted and put the kettle on. We can sit on the coping and count the open ones, and you can tell me what you have decided about the house, and I will pretend I have not already decided for you.

Love, Margaret