Every year on my birthday, from the time I turned 12, a white gardenia  was delivered  _ to me at my house. No card or note came with it. Calls to the florist   were always in vain ---- it was a cash purchase. After a while I stopped trying to discover the sender's identity.  But I never stopped imagining who the anonymous sender might be.  My mother often contributed to these imaginings. She'd ask me if there was someone for whom I had done a special kindness who might be showing appreciation. Perhaps the neighbor I'd help when she was unloading a car full of groceries. Or maybe it was the old man across the street whose mail I retrieved  during the winter so he wouldn't have to venture down his icy steps.  When I was 17, a boy broke my heart. The night he called for me the last time, I cried myself to sleep. When I awoke in the morning, there was a message scribbled  on my mirror in red lipstick: "Heartily know, when half-gods go, the gods arrive." I thought about that quotation from Emerson   for a long time, and I left it where my mother had written it. When I finally went to get the glass cleaner, my mother knew everything was all right again. I don't remember ever slamming  my door in anger at her and shouting, "You just don't understand!" because she did understand.     One month before my high-school graduation, my father died suddenly of a heart attack. My feelings ranged from grief to abandonment, fear and over-whelming anger that my dad was missing some of the most important events in my life. I became completely uninterested in my upcoming graduation, the senior-class play and the prom-events  that I had worked on and looked forward to.  But my mother, in the midst of her own grief, would not hear of my missing out any of those things. The day before my father died, she and I had gone shopping for a prom dress and found a spectacular  one. Wearing it made me feel like a princess, but it was the wrong size, and when my father died the next day, I forgot all about the dress. My mother didn't. The day before the prom, I found that dress-in the right size, draped over the living room sofa, presented to me -- beautifully, artistically and lovingly. I didn't care about having a new dress, but my mother did. She wanted her children to feel loved and lovable, creative and imaginative. My mother died when I was 22, only ten days after I was married. That was the year the gardenias stopped coming. Why did Mother try to arouse the author's imagination about the gardenia sender?
Because she wanted her child to feel cherished and loved not just by her but by the world. Because she had a great curiosity like a child. Because she was romantic and she once experienced such the same thing at her young age. Because she wanted to give her child some tips about the gardenia sender.