A Winter Flower

She awoke from her rice paper thin sleep and fumbled for her spectacles, then carefully rose and made her way to the mirror. She stared, sighed, shook her head and spoke to her reflection. "I haven't seen so many wrinkles since the great shar-pei migration of nineteen-aught-eight." She smiled. Her husband would have liked that joke; he always appreciated her wit. But he'd been gone a long time and she just never felt like sharing her attempts at humor with anyone else. 

After her morning routine she settled in the rocking chair by the window, wrapped a blanket around her and watched the snowflakes lazily descend like white petals gently falling from a dying flower. Out there, buried beneath the snow, was her perennial garden. She stared at the few scraggly dead sticks piercing the snowdrifts. "They seem dead," she thought aloud. "Well, they are dead, they're just dead sticks now, now in winter. But, oh, how beautiful they were earlier this year! And even now the winter hasn't killed them, not really. The roots are still alive, they're just resting under the snow in the cold ground. Old blossoms are gone, but new ones are hiding in the sleeping roots, just waiting. No matter how many winters come and go the roots survive and they'll make new flowers once the winter is gone. Even in the dead of winter, when they all seem dead, the flowers live in the roots, just waiting, waiting for the spring. There are always flowers, even in the worst of winters; they're just waiting in secret, secure in the roots and waiting for the proper time to blossom." Satisfied with her rather rambling and repetitious oration, she wrapped herself more tightly in her blanket and began rocking, dreamily reminiscing about the seasons and flowers, her husband and herself. Then, smiling, she closed her eyes and slipped out of her winter and into the eternal spring.