If you read the intro, "How I got here...," you'll understand a little more than you would if you're starting on this page.

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My beloved Father passed on 4/14/16.  The following day, family and friends began arriving to express their condolences to my Mother. With only one exception, everyone who arrived brought with them, potted begonias. LOTS of potted begonias. It was almost funny.  After every delivery, Mother would ask me to "just put it on the porch."  I complied but we quickly began to run out of room. Every surface housed a potted begonia.  Mother didn't even like begonias. She assumed they must have been on sale. I laughed hard over that. She had such a dry, sarcastic sense of humor.

 

Later that day the skies darkened and the winds picked up considerably. Then came a storm that no one had anticipated.  Electricity was out, limbs down and trees were uprooted. The cleanup the following day was a real mess. All the potted begonias on the porch were tossed about, with broken containers everywhere and begonia blooms scattered all over the porch and doorway.

 

Begonia blooms are waxy and they tend to smear when stepped on. It took hours to sweep up the waxy blooms from the 300 square foot porch. The porch was still damp and the blooms just seemed to stick. Hours I labored, sweeping the porch, because I knew that everyone of those waxy blooms that were tracked into the house would leave a reddish waxy stain on the floor. I was almost finished and I could see Mother through the window standing at the kitchen sink. I motioned for her to come to the door to see the cleanup effort. She did.  I was trying to keep her mind off of our immediate source of depression. I thought the clean porch with the begonias gone would help.  She opened the door and told me "it looks so much better," and turned to go back inside. I finished up. I was about to step back into the house, when on the rug, at the door, was one last, hateful, waxy, red begonia bloom. It was sure to find its way into the house on the bottom of my shoe, only to cause an inside cleanup again. I bent down to pick up the bloom so that I could throw it away and as I picked it up I realized that it looked like something was written on it. I couldn't believe my eyes. I walked into the house looking at it.  Mother noticed and she asked, "what is it?" I walked over to the table were she was sitting and laid it in front of her. She looked in amazement and began to smile as her eyes filled with tears. She quietly said "Jim."  Jim was my Dad's name. She said "he's letting us know that he's okay."  I knew that begonia bloom wouldn't last too long in a warm house, so I took a photo of it. 

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Here's the photo of the begonia bloom:

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