Flowering in the Frost

Every year, these tiny cyclamen plants perform the miracle of flowering while the ground is still frozen. 
They are growing in my mother’s garden. It was a carer‘s change day, with a new (yes, again) carer arriving in the morning, and E leaving for Poland in the evening. As usual, I was the taxi, picking up B, the new lady, at 8 a.m. at the main bus station in town to drive her to my mother’s house; then returning home for work, and later taking E to her bus at 7 p.m., which made it a 12-hour workday for me.

It all went swimmingly, until E and I arrived at the station, and she realized that she had left her handbag (with her passport, bus ticket, phone and money) in my mother’s house. There was not enough time to drive back and get it, so I phoned Frau G, my mother’s older, German carer, because I knew that she was going to have dinner with my mother and B tonight, and her car was in the driveway already.
I don’t know how she did it, but she managed to get the handbag to the station, and to E, just in time before the Polish bus driver (who very kindly had agreed to wait for ten minutes after his scheduled departure time) lost his patience. It‘s a 30-minutes drive at least, but Frau G made it in 25. I guess it helped that she was a taxi driver once.

So now, E is finally on her way home.