Our florist for the past twenty-something years, she really deserves to be a character in one of my future novels. Ruth hums across the weathered floor boards of her shop like the Energizer bunny, all business, spewing recommendations. One doesn’t argue with a spitfire like Ruth.

It’s normally, “Kit, come! You have to see what just came in!” as I scurry to keep up with her, trying not to make eye contact with all the colorful stems brimming from buckets behind cooler doors, like puppies at the Humane Society begging me to take them all home. “Aren’t these unusual?” she’ll say, or “Here–smell these, oh you definitely need some of these for the tea shop, I’ll just wrap them up . . .”

By now I’ve usually forgotten why I came in the first place.

This time, though, things were different.

I’d stopped by Ruth’s flower shop to thank her for a bouquet that arrived several days earlier—on the morning of my 39th wedding anniversary. Once Garth managed to convince me the flowers had not been delivered on his behalf, I’d dug around and found the card.

The stunning bouquet of white daisies and blue delphinium were from Ruth herself. I received flowers from . . . the flower lady?

Three afternoons in a row, I drove over to thank her, but her shop had already closed for the day.

When at last we connected, gone was Energizer-bunny Ruth. She stood like a wilted daisy before me, her red-rimmed eyes intense. “I finally had a chance to read your book,” she said, then explained that on her recent trip out of state to visit her ninety-two-year-old father and her mother with advanced Alzheimer’s, she’d begun reading The Color of Home on the plane and finished it over the course of her visit.

She gripped my arms. Tears pooled in her eyes. “You get it, Kit. You get it!”

Turns out, Ruth sent the flowers to thank me . . . for writing a story that connected with and comforted her at just the right moment in time. Daisies are a major motif in The Color of Home, but they were out of season, so she had special ordered them. What?!

And in the four days before I managed to deliver my thanks, Ruth’s mother passed. Now here she was in one of her busiest seasons, preparing to sell gobs of flowers to folks in our town—for, of all things, Mother’s Day!

Ruth and I had never discussed spiritual matters. We sure did now. “The timing,” I said. “It’s so . . .”

She stepped closer, her voice hushed. “Divine.”

Heaven’s perfume filled the flower shop. The old plank floor now sacred ground. And as I left, carrying a somewhat forlorn grape ivy she’d insisted I take home at no charge, I carried out something else Ruth wasn’t aware of. The encouragement I needed to keep writing, even when it’s hard.

Even when it hurts.