His Favourite Flower

 Day 236: They were his favourite flower, blood-red peonies, and while he was a man who worked the soil and brought forth fine crops of corn, beans and squash, his assistance in my mother's flower beds was notoriously disastrous; to wit the painstaking removal of all her poppies in the belief that they were a type of thistle. Peony roots, however, were something he recognized, and he contributed to their well-being with generous applications of the hand-turned compost he brought up from the bottom of the field. It is peonies, not poppies, that I associate with men in uniformed service and veterans, and peonies which bring the tears to my eyes in empathy for the families which have been shattered by death in the name of war.

My father died not in battle during the Second World War, but some years later of an insidious disease contracted as a result of unimaginable deprivations suffered during almost four years in an internment camp. For as long as we lived within driving distance of the cemetery where he is buried, it was my mother's custom to blanket his grave on Memorial Day with 39 of the peonies he so loved: one for each year of his brief span of life.