1 . Never had a lovely sunflower been absent to my house on my birthday, since I turned 13. No cards or notes in it. Calls to the flower shop were always ________—it was a cash purchase.

I never stopped ________ who the mysterious giver might be. Some of my happiest moments were spent daydreaming about someone wonderful but too shy to disclose his or her ________.

My mother even ________ my imaginations. She’d ask me if there was someone who I had done a special favor and then might be showing ________ As a teenager, ________, I had more fun assuming that it might be a boy I had ________ secretly.

When I was 17, I failed ________ in a significant test. That night when the result came. I just ________ myself to sleep. When I awoke in the morning, my mother ________, “Don’t be discouraged! It’s not a big deal!” Yet, I remembered ________ out of the house at that time, yelling… “You just don’t understand!”

One month before my graduation from high school, my father died of a heart attack. My feelings ranged from pain to ________ so that I became completely uninterested in the upcoming ceremony. But my mother, in the midst of her own grief, would deny my ________ any of those things. Before my father died, we had shopped a party dress which made me feel like a(an) ________ Cinderella (灰姑娘). But it was the ________ size. Later I totally forgot about the dress.

My mother didn’t. The day before the dance, I found that ________, in the right size, ________ in the box to me gracefully and lovingly. She just ________ her child to feel loved and showed that there still existed magic and ________ even in the face of hardships.

Actually, my mother passed away one week after I got married. That year the adorable sunflower never ________.