Gift Giving / Keeping

My mother had a birthday last weekend and for the sake of protecting her pride I will not reveal which birthday this was.

Several days before the event (on Sunday, which was destined to be a beautiful early fall day, complete with slight breeze and surprise funeral) I was walking the streets of my beloved dirty little city and walked by a flower vendor. He had advertised flowers for sale at 2 dollars and up. I dismissed the thought before I even had it because I knew for a fact that there was only one dollar bill in my bag.

However, on my return trip home, I rummaged through my tiny purse and found that while there was only one single dollar bill, there were quarters aplenty*. I smiled and, upon reaching the vendor, purchased a not-quite-perfect pink rose for my mother's birthday.

*aplenty = here, referring to more than a dollar and fifty cents because this will more than pay for any parking meter or will wash one very expensive load of laundry note. a copious amount of quarters would have purchased any of the vendor's flowers on their own or washed and dried that same load of laundry

This was Friday afternoon and the events that followed the purchase are not relevant to this story. So much is to say that when I returned to my parents' house on Saturday afternoon, I cried to an empty house, "Damn!" as I had left my mother's not-quite-perfect pink rose in my refrigerator in the city.

Epilogue:
I purchased my mother a fifteen dollar bouquet of kind-of-shitty fall colored mums and assorted things from the local food lion. (I apparently could not recall that there was a legitimate florist three minutes down the road.) She enjoyed them and all was well in the home on Sunday except for a rather tragic surprise funeral. It's tragedy was the death, the manner of the death, and it's date of my mother's birthday.

Afterword:
I only regurgitate this story because as I avoid writing a lab paper on glycolysis, I am staring at a lovely pink rose which perked up well after being in the cold for 3 days without water and I am not terribly horribly sorry that I left it here. I'll never pass up on a little cheer nearing midnight.