The Shoe-box, version 2

        When my grandfather passed away, I was asked to speak at his funeral.  
        "You were the only family he had left," people insisted, lightly squeezing my arm as a gesture of sympathy.  But the truth was he was the only family I had left as well.  With him gone, there was nothing left for me but my empty apartment.
        I went to his house the night after he passed, like I had so many nights before, only his gruff voice wasn't there to greet me.  I opened the front door and stepped into the cozy living room, eyeing the worn blue chair he spent most of his time in, now empty, and walked over to sit down next to it.  On an old table at the chairs right arm sat a shoe-box, it's corners wrinkled from years of my grandfather's handling.
        I was eight years old when I first asked him about it.
        "Grandpa, what's in that old shoe-box?" I had said, my voice high and inquisitive.
        He smiled his tender smile, pulled the box onto his lap and pat the lid.
        "In here, I keep a collection of seeds," he told me.
        "Seeds?  What kind of seeds?"
        "They are the seeds of the most beautiful thing in the whole world."
        I pictured him sitting in his chair again, holding the shoe-box on his lap, a clever smile on his face.  I walked over to the table, picked up the brown box, and turned towards the empty chair.
        "Well, Grandpa, let's see what these seeds can do," I said, and headed out the front door.
        He kept a small garden right beneath the living-room window.  He grew vegetables mostly, though it was usually overrun by weeds.  I dropped to my knees beside the plot, rolled up my sleeves and began to shovel earth with my bare hands.  When I had cleared a big enough area, I lay the shoe-box down and covered it with dark soil.  As I patted the dirt down, it began to drizzle, and I trudged back into the house.  I lay down on the couch in the living room, as I often did when my grandfather had dozed off sitting in his favorite blue chair, and closed my eyes, falling asleep to the sound of the rain tapping on the windows.
        It poured all through the night and well into the morning.  When the sun finally came out, it revealed the whole world to be glistening and damp.
        I high-stepped through the wet grass to the plot in the garden, and noticed something peeking through the dirt.  Crouching down, I saw a small green shoot, not half-an-inch high, reaching up from the damp soil.  I smiled, and began pulling the weeds that encroached on the plant's growth and carried them to the compost pile in the backyard.  When the plot was clear, I pulled a dirty plastic plant tag, one my grandfather had used to mark his cherry tomatoes, from amidst a tangle of weeds.  I wrote the word "Beauty" on the back with a thick marker, and stuck it in the wet dirt beside the plot.
        The next few days unfolded similarly.  Making my way to the garden in the early afternoon, I would notice the sprout had grown significantly since the day before, and the weeds I had pulled would be replace by more, and they would be growing even thicker.  So each day, I faithfully pulled up my sleeves and got busy, tearing out weeds by their roots, dragging them by the fistful to the compost pile.  Each day the tending took more time and energy, and after only a few days I found myself finishing up as the sun sank below the horizon.
        In four short days, the sprout grew to a full two meters tall, it's healthy stem as thick as a fist.  Leaves and branches showed signs of sprouting, and a bud was forming near the top of the stalk.  
        "What are you growing there?" a voice said while I was yanking out a thick patch of clover.
        I stood up and turned around to see Mrs. Baker, a mid-fifties housewife and longtime neighbor of my grandfather, smiling warmly.  Before I had a chance to answer her question, she chimed in again.
        "It's pretty warm out today, and you looked like you could use a drink," she said, and extended a tall glass of lemonade towards me.  I thanked her and took the glass, brown dirt caked up to my elbows.  She stepped towards the plant and crouched down to look at the plant tag.
        "'Beauty', huh?" she said, rolling up her sleeves.
        "Yup, courtesy of my late grandfather."
        "They sure were eager to grow, weren't they?" she says rhetorically, pulling out clumps of weeds.
        I remember back to when I was twelve, sitting with my grandfather, the box of seeds on the table beside his chair, his hand resting lovingly atop it.
        "Grandpa," I asked, finally finding words to a question I had for awhile.  "If those are seeds, why don't you plant them?"
        He smiled and patted me on the shoulder.
        "Why should I plant them?" he asked me.  "I already know they are beautiful."
        "But Grandpa, if you plant beautiful seeds, beautiful things will grow, right?"
        "Yes, you're right," he said, amused at my persistence.  "But I've already know what this beautiful flower looks like.  I've seen it before."
        "You have?"
        "Yes, I have.  I saw the flower that gave me these seeds," he said, tapping the lid of the box.  I sat back, confused, and he leaned back in his chair and was soon sleeping, his fingers toying the box's corners even in his slumber.
        By day six, the branches from Beauty's stem began pushing through the windows of my grandfather's house.  Tending to the plant became an all-day process, and Mrs. Baker and I had been joined by many other neighbors, all elbow-deep in healthy dirt.  The weeds were growing in just as fast as we could pull them; roses, lilies, orchids and sunflowers grew at an alarming rate, wrapping their greedy stems around Beauty's base, and we ripped them mercilessly out of the ground.  The compost pile behind the house had grown to fill most of the backyard, housing an ecosystem all it's own.
        My grandfather's front lawn became the hub of the neighborhood.  Adults slept and weeded in shifts, and kids would chase each other, weaving through the sleeping bodies, telling tall tales about Beauty.  Mrs. Baker provided lemonade to everyone, making half a dozen trips back and forth from her house to transport one fresh batch.
        "Goodness, what kind of seeds did you say these were again?" a man asked me from his knees, a tangle of violets in each dirty fist.
        I had wondered the same thing myself.  What did the seeds of the most beautiful thing look like?  My grandfather would never show me as a kid, let alone open the box when I was around.  But I had been determined to find out.  So once, while he slept in his blue chair, I tiptoed over to him, slipped the box out from beneath his palm, and sat down on the floor to investigate.
        The lid didn't slip off easily; the years had molded it to the sides of the box.  I wiggled it free, corner by corner, until the lid came free.  When I pulled it off, a plume of dust erupted from inside the box, and settled lightly on the carpet by my feet.  Setting the lid down beside me, I hesitantly peeked inside, unsure of what I would find.
        Inside the box was a collection of yellowed envelopes, each with the same curly handwriting on the front.  I lifted one up gingerly, pulled out the stiff paper inside and unfolded it.  The letter addressed my grandfather, and it was signed on the bottom:
        With a love that grows and grows,
       Annie
        I folded the letter back up and slid it back into the envelope.  I grabbed the lid of the box, and noticed something taped to the underside.  I flipped it over and was greeted by an old cracked picture of my grandmother, smiling sweetly in the dress she wore to marry my grandfather.  I replaced the lid, and put the box back on the desk beneath my grandfather's loving hand.
        By the time the bud was ready to blossom, Beauty had grown into the house, reaching in the windows and spilling out through the wood siding.  Branches crawled up the drainpipes and were pushing up the shingles on the roof.  From my position kneeling in the dirt among my neighbors, I couldn't tell whether it was the house that was holding up the plant, or the other way around.
        As Beauty was about to bloom, the weeds gave up their crusade and died back.  We dusted off our arms and pants and stepped back to watch.  The petals slowly arched away from the center of the bud, revealing the tall stamen and rich color of the flower.  It opened further, and a sweet scent was released that slowly washed over us like honey.  It soaked up the mid-day sun, and butterflies and bees made their way through the crowd to get a glimpse and a taste of Beauty.
        "Wow, I sure wish your grandfather were here to see this," Mrs. Baker said, staring awestruck at the flower.  I looked around at all the families standing together, mothers and fathers and children holding each other and admiring Beauty.
        "He didn't need to see it," I said, and put my arm around Mrs. Baker.  "He's seen it before."
        Mrs. Baker looked to me and smiled, then leaned forward to pluck the last pesky orchid from the base of the flower, and threw it limp onto the lawn.