Wildflower sprig with script 'Wild' on upper arm

Mam has finally stopped asking when you are coming home, so I thought I would write instead, since you never answer the telephone at the boarding house. The hay meadow behind Cutler's farm is full of the things you used to press in Dad's old atlas. Star daisies up past the stile, and the lavender-coloured spikes by the beck that the bees go mad for. I took a sprig of each to the vicar's wife for the altar, and she said I had picked them off the verges like a vagrant. I told her they grew where nobody had planted them, which is the whole point.

Mr Pell from the bank came round asking after you. He says a girl with your head for sums should not be wasting it on hat-making in Leeds. I told him you had gone where nothing was ruled in columns, and he looked at me as though I had spoken Welsh.

There is a small bud on the stem by the lane that I have been watching for a week. It is the sort that opens only when nobody is looking, and this morning it had, so I am sending you the stalk pressed flat inside this letter. Mind it does not crack in the envelope.

Write when you can. Tell me the city has not made you tidy. Your loving sister, Ruth