The Yellow Flower

On my return to the house, I noticed a plant growing right outside the front door. It was quite tall, nearly reaching my knees, with thin yellow petals, right in the middle of the dusty path.

Though tall, the flower seemed too beautiful and delicate to be there all alone. I didn’t think it was a weed. Of course, weeds don’t really exist. They are only a matter of perception. If someone doesn’t like a dandelion growing on their lawn, they will call it a weed out of spite because we human beings have to draw a line between everything: Us/them. Mathematics/poetry. Weed/flower.

But what I mean is: it wasn’t the kind of flower people would call a weed. It was the kind of flower people choose to plant. But why would Christina, or anyone, plant a flower on a dry path directly in front of a door? And, more pressingly, why hadn’t I noticed it before?

I took a photograph and sent it via WhatsApp to my sister-in-law Sophie in Australia. Not only did she run a florist, but her partner had a degree in botany. Maybe they would be able to tell me its name. I was going to have to look after all the plants on the premises if I stuck around.

I went inside and noticed another thing.

The jar of seawater was now full. Not a third full, but full. There was sure to be a rational explanation. The lid was still screwed on, but I still looked up for a sign of a leaky pipe. There was nothing but a dry ceiling, and it certainly hadn’t been raining.

Yet there it was: an olive jar that had somehow refilled itself with seawater. A kind of reverse evaporation, an extreme condensation that – at least according to the laws of nature I was familiar with – would be impossible. I felt again like someone was playing a practical joke on me.

When I was young, as I have told you, I read quite a lot of Sherlock Holmes alongside my Alexandre Dumas. The novels and the short stories. There is a famous line in the most perfect of all the novels, The Sign of Four, where Holmes tells Watson that when you “have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”

So that is what I was faced with. All the explanations as to why an olive jar would refill itself weren’t possible. So I was left with only illogic and improbability. And I have to say, I didn’t like that at all.