Flowers were for Algernon, now also for Yoko

I love fresh cut flowers but we don't have them in the house too often because my mom doesn't like buying them. My grandma loved cut flowers so my mom was constantly having to buy them toward the end of my grandma's stay on earth. I guess she got sick of them and had once told me that so I thought she just didn't like them. "That's why I have so many dried flowers in the house," she told me by way of explanation. She will get them from time to time, though, which surprised me. Once I asked her why she was going to buy flowers because I thought she hated them. "I don't hate them," she told me. "I just don't like them." I suppose there is a difference.

Speaking of flowers, my mom's friend Ogura san, carpenter extraordinaire, came to help out with tree trimming earlier in the week and he brought about a dozen beautiful long-stemmed roses for my mom for her birthday.I happened upon her as she was trimming them to put in a vase. She had the scissors ready to cut more than half-way up the stem and she comments, "It seems like such a waste to cut off the long stem!"
"Don't cut the stem off!" I blurted out. "That's what makes these special!"
"Oh."
"They sell the short stemmed kind at the florist, too, you know," Ogura san piped in casually. So my mom found a vase that would hold these long stemmed beauties and starts filling it with water. "Please don't use hot water," he requests. He has a dry sense of humor and his quick, perfect timing is awesome. Sadly, so much of it gets lost in translation. There are many a thing he has said that still make me laugh like crazy.