Cherry trees are in full bloom for two weeks at the most. The perfect, delicate flowers have come to represent the essence of life itself - shockingly beautiful and heartbreakingly fleeting.

I’m talking about the language of flowers. It’s from the Victorian era, like your name. If a man gave a young lady a bouquet of flowers, she would race home and try to decode it like a secret message. Red roses mean love; yellow roses infidelity. So a man would have to choose his flowers carefully.

While I worked, I thought about Earl's wife, tried to bring forth an image of the once-passionate woman: her tired, withdrawn, unsuspecting face. Would she react to the wild bouquet of mums and periwinkle, truth and tender recollections? I felt sure she would, and imagined the relief and gratitude on Earl's face as he boiled water for tea, provoking the opinionated woman he had missed into a discussion of politics or poetry.

Hyacinth. Please forgive me.