Every week, Lisa Ricard Claro, at her blog Writing in the Buff, invites writer-bloggers to look at a photo she has provided, imagine it to be the cover of a book, imagine the contents of the book, then write a "blurb" of no more than 150 words to convince browsers to become buyers.
This week's photo is one I took in May of this year, when spring finally came to southern Alberta. The flowers are blossoms on a bush in my yard, but I can't remember the name of the bush, so the heroine of the imaginary book, for which I've written a blurb, doesn't know what they are, either.
Here is my submission of 150 words, not including the title or author's name.
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White Flowers: For Life, for Death
by Minnie Cooper
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Emmy stared at the old photo for a long time. She recognized the flowers—not by name, but from her parents’ wedding picture. Her mother had carried flowers like these down the aisle, and the same blossoms had been placed on her grave a year later, when Emmy was an infant.
Her father told her he never knew their name, just that they grew in the garden of his young wife’s rooming house. He never knew who left them on the grave, either. When he visited the rooming house weeks after the funeral, looking for answers, the doors were locked, the windows boarded, the landlady and her tenants all dispersed, and the garden uprooted.
Who mailed the photo to Emmy fifty years later? And why? What was the significance of the flowers?
Emmy knew she had to find out. She was so glad her only son had become a detective.
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| Does this color photo give anyone a clue as to the plant's identity? —K |
