Two snowdrops with looping green leaves

The snowdrops came up under the old yew on Tuesday, three days after the thaw that wasn't really a thaw, just a grey lull between two storms. Mr Abney from the post office swore they'd be late this year. I told him the bulbs at Hollin Cross never listen to anybody.

Nothing else here has changed. The inn still shuts its kitchen at half past eight, and Marjorie Fell still counts the coal scuttles every night as though they might walk off. Gideon has gone up to the top field to fetch the ewes down before the next fall, so the lane has been empty all week and I've had time to walk the wall path and look properly. Two flowers hang from curved stems, white as the paper I'm writing on, each with a little green heart painted on its petals like someone meant it kindly. The leaves don't stand up straight the way they do in the seed catalogue. They loop round each other, cross over, and at the bottom they curl into a figure of eight that tightens into a spiral, as if the plant were trying to keep something close.

I sat on the wall for an hour yesterday trying to work out whether the spiral was a mistake of the frost or a habit of the plant. Then Marjorie came out with a tray of mugs and said her mother had always told her snowdrops were the first thing to come back after a bad winter, and that you must never pick them indoors or the house will go cold. I laughed. She didn't.

I've kept the bulb you sent with the last parcel, the one wrapped in the Tuesday paper. I'm going to put it in next to the yew tomorrow, where the leaves can wind their way round the others. Write and tell me if yours have come up yet. If they have, I'll know spring is coming here too, and we can stop pretending the inn's coal is enough to keep us warm.

Your loving sister, Anne