The Mystery Is Solved!

         Need a Christmas gift idea?
      How about books, a little naughty but nice?
      Such sweet, spicy sugarplums
      They'll want to read them twice!

"Equal and Opposite Reactions" and "Hail Mary"
Available on Amazon
​http://amzn.to/2xvcgRa
https://www.amzn.com/1684334888

      The mystery of the white roses has at last been solved.
     As chronicled in my previous post (see post from 12/9/2020, "The Mystery Of The Roses), five  days ago I received a dozen-and-a-half beautiful white roses with a condolence card for the recent passing of my mother,

...but with the name of the sender missing from the card. Hence I'd spent the last several days trying to figure out who had sent the roses, every hunch I followed coming up negatory.
      Then the night before last I found this envelope taped to the front door:

      Inside the envelope was a surprise, indeed: a note and a photo revealing that the senders of the roses were my nephew Randy and his wife Anusha. 

   But of course! Randy and Anusha! Strangely enough, the only people I hadn't thought of! The wording of the erroneously anonymous card now made sense: ​

      My nephew having lived with us years ago, and in more recent years he and Anusha being - prior to the COVID epidemic - part of our regular Sunday night dinner crowd,

...Randy had come to know my mother, and Anusha had met her a time or two as well, from my mother's visits over the years to Ohio.  In fact the last time they saw my mom was December a year ago when I brought her home one time for Sunday dinner shortly after she moved from Seaford, Delaware to the nearby Sunrise senior care facility.

     The card and the roses now made perfect sense: Randy and Anusha knew my mom well enough to specify her by name on the card, as well as to describe her as "a sweet lady" who "just lit up a room."  And they were close enough to me to send me a bouquet of eighteen roses. 
      Amazing how sometimes we miss what should have been so obvious.
     Anyway, there's more to the story. As it turns out, I was not the first one to learn the identity of the mystery white rose gifters.  
       My sister-in-law, Randy's mother Mary Jane, 

...guessed the solution to the mystery as soon as she read my blog about the the white roses. The key for Mary Jane was the place from whence the roses came: Sam's Club.
      Now, many people know that Sam's club sells flowers in bulk - for weddings, for example. In fact my daughter Claire ordered her wedding flowers from Sam's Club (see her wedding posts posts from 5/1/2014 - 5/9/2014). Here's a picture of my me cutting the Sam's Club flowers at Claire's mother-in-law's house in Wickenburg, Arizona, Wickenburg being where the wedding took place.

     And here's my mom, still a youngster of 94 at the time, helping to set up the flowers at the wedding venue.

     But though many people know that Sam's Club sends out bulk flowers, not many people know, as Mary Jane pointed out to me, that Sam's Club also sends gift floral arrangements. However Mary Jane did know this fact, mainly because Anusha and Randy from time to time gift her with a bouquet from Sam's Club.
        And so as soon as Mary Jane read my blog about the roses having come from from Sam's Club, she had a hunch who'd sent them. She called Randy and he confirmed that it was, in fact, he and Anusha who had sent me the roses. They decided to let the mystery percolate for another couple of days just for fun and to see if anyone else would guess. Nobody did, though my daughter Maria probably came closest.

     She thought the answer might be one of the Liszkay/Loushin cousins. I should have followed her hunch. 
     Still, it was, in fact, a sweet, funny moment when Anusha and Randy sprung the surprise. But one sweet surprise deserves another, so last night Randy and Anusha likewise found a surprise on their front porch. ;)