Three flowers and swirls on an ankle

The rain came in off the river before the market had even unloaded, so Dad and I stood under the awning with buckets of stock going soggy at our feet. You'd have laughed at him, cursing the tarp and then apologising to the tulips. By eleven the stall was nearly empty except for three cuttings I'd been saving for the Hendersons' allotment, wrapped in newspaper gone the colour of weak tea.

Mrs Achterberg came by at half past, shaking water off a golf umbrella that had seen better decades. She asked for the purple clematis, the blue larkspur and the pink lily, and when I said they were spoken for she only smiled and tapped the notebook I keep under the till. Her late husband had written a line in it years ago, a bit of verse on the back page about how a garden grows in a single wet season. She wanted it copied onto the wrapping in his handwriting, which she had brought with her in a folded envelope.

So I sat on the upturned crate and copied it out, letter by letter, while the rain ran off the awning in a bead curtain. The loops of the ink kept wanting to become vines, and I let them. When I handed over the parcel she tucked the three stems inside her coat and said rain was the best thing that could happen to a market, because it made people stop.

That is what I keep thinking about. Write back and tell me whether the allotment got its larkspur.

Love, Jo