Two sunflowers in black and grey shading

The snow has been up to the second step of the back porch since Tuesday, and Mr Okonedo in room four has taken to playing cards with the coal man just to have someone to argue with. I am writing this at the bar with the lamp turned low, because the kitchen fire wants feeding and I have decided it can wait five minutes.

You will remember the seed packet Mother kept in the biscuit tin. Sunflowers, the tall Mammoth kind, grown along the orchard wall the summer before she died. I found the tin behind the flour sacks yesterday and the packet was still there, and inside it a few husks, brown as old tea. I could not bring myself to throw them out. I have set them on the windowsill in the snug, where the light comes in grey off the drift, and every morning I look at them and think how the whole field turned its face to the sun like a congregation.

Here is the odd part. Last night a traveller came in, a thin man with frost in his eyebrows, and asked for a room and a hot drink. While I poured he pushed up his sleeve to warm his arm by the grate, and there on his shoulder were two sunflowers in pencil grey, one large and one tucked behind it, every seed on their faces drawn so fine I wanted to count them. He saw me looking and said his sister had done it the year she left home. He did not say more and I did not ask.

I gave him the back room and the good blanket. This morning he had gone, the path dug out to the road, and on the table he had left a single seed folded in a scrap of paper. Mother would have planted it. So shall I, come April, once the ground stops being iron. I will write when the first leaf shows.