It's a three-year old Japanese tree peony. Nothing that should have stopped me in my tracks except

a. tree peonies around here don't bloom until the end of May, or -- with the cold nights we've been having here -- early June;

b. the previous evening, after I'd wrapped KC in her bedding for the last time and put her next to Boots and Saddles deep in the back garden, I'd passed the thing on the way to the mailbox and it didn't have a thing on it but leaves; and

c. according to the catalog, this particular Taiyo cultivar would bloom *red*, not pink. And at three years of age, this was its first blooming.

The blossom is so heavy, it bent the stem almost to the ground (relax -- I staked it after I took the pic).

Now, I know a dog's got a rather limited view of the color spectrum -- varying shades of yellow, greenish-blue, true blue, white and grey -- but KC knew what *pink* was, and liked it, no matter what the object was or its texture or smell.

Her food dish was pale pink and the old sweatshirt she slept on was hot pink. Visitors were welcomed politely, but visitors who wore pink got the Unmitigated Doggie Dance of Joy. I tried an experiment once: Muffy's food dish is the same make and model as KC's, but Muff's is light beige, so it fell into the same part of the dog-view spectrum as pink. Both were freshly washed and both had the same amount of food in them. I stuck Muffy's dish in front of KC and KC's dish in front of Muffy -- KC scrambled across the kitchen to *her* dish.

So much for background. Start your engines, kids, here's the poser:

Was it a coincidence that a tree peony with a half-inch diameter stem went from having no flower buds to producing an eight-inch diameter bloom overnight (and a chilly night, at that) about a month ahead of its neighbors (there's another one six feet further down the driveway -- *no* buds) and producing a pink flower rather than a red one?

-- Or --

Did Something Who inhabited a small, furry body for less than an eyeblink in Eternity leave a final gift and stroll off with a jaunty grin?

Whichever it was, thank You...