Still doesn’t.

But she knew what BVDs were.

Underwear. Men’s underwear. Lightweight, loose, one-piece underwear, with front buttons and back flaps.

“And when I got that note ... ”

Well, if she hadn’t gotten that note then, she wouldn’t own Bloomers Greenhouse and Garden Shop now and be celebrating its first birthday out on Highway 29 South?

But the name connection you’re noticing already — BVDs, Bloomers, aha! underwear! — is, alas, inaccurate. The only connection these BVDs and Bloomers have is love and kindness, but that’s getting ahead of the story because Patti Safrit got that note 20 years ago.

That’s when she was a secretary for Ithaca, a company that made men’s T-shirts and underwear for JCPenney and Sears in the building that became Brendle’s and is now the Rowan County Health Department.

If she hadn’t been the secretary, somebody else would have gotten the note. But she was and opened the envelope and read the request from a woman in Florida looking for BVDs for her husband.

“I knew exactly what she was talking about,” Patti says, “because my grandpaw wore BVDs. I even called my grandpaw. He was Delmer Goodman. You must have known my grandpaw. Everybody knew him. He made keys at Bernhardt’s Hardware.”

They didn’t know him just because he cut keys two days a week.

It was that he always had something to say while he cut ’em.

Like his explanation for bald-headed men, of which he was one.

“The Lord only created so many bald-headed men,” he’d explain, “and the balance of them He covered with hair.”

And strawberries.

“I saw a man on a farm putting chicken manure around them,” he used to say, “so I said, ‘I put cream and sugar on my strawberries!’ ”

But Grandpaw couldn’t help Patti, so she called around but couldn’t find any BVDs for the lady’s husband in Florida.

“So I wrote her and told her the places I had checked — Hanes and everybody. I probably tried three or four places. And a week later I got a card from her with a $10 bill in it. She said I should buy a box of candy. But I sent it back.”

With another note, of course, explaining that said she couldn’t keep the money.

“I told her I’d want someone to help my grandpaw if he couldn’t find any BVDs.”

Well, the lady in Florida — Lila, her name was, Lila Schenck — wrote back. And that was the beginning.

“We started writing,” Patti says. Like pen pals. Like they were the same age instead of being generations apart. Why, Patti was only 18. Lila was about 70.

But age didn’t matter. They wrote, told each other everything. Lila told Patti she and Bill had lived in Chicago and moved to Florida when he retired. Patti told Lila about her family and her job.

“I went through a divorce, and she was always there, encouraging me. And when I remarried, she sent me a check and said she wanted to buy me a wedding dress. I invited her for Thanksgiving and Christmas, but she didn’t feel comfortable traveling. I’d send her little packages for Christmas and her birthday, and she’d send me a picture of her Christmas tree.

“We went through weddings and the birth of children,” she says, and when Lila’s husband died on their 50th wedding anniversary, she wrote Patti all about it. “They went out to dinner. They knew he was sick, and he died during the night. They’d had one child who died when she was 2 of spina bifida. And I wrote her when my grandparents died.

“She was so sweet. It was just like having another grandma in Florida.”

And finally, the first weekend in May two years ago, Patti and her family went to Orlando, Fla. Lila lived on the Gulf.

By then Lila was 89, and of course it was OK,. So Patti packed her car with plants and dirt and went.

“That was two years ago this week,” she says. “And I planted her a garden. She had this beautiful house. I had squash and cucumbers from Rowan County, and I said, ‘Let’s put them here in the circle drive.’ ”

It was a wonderful visit, and Patti wrote and told her so, and Lila wrote about the garden.

“Then in June she wrote and said she knew when I was there that she had cancer,” Patti says, “but she elected not to take treatment for it. She said, ‘My parents taught me that the best is yet to come. I’m not afraid. I know each day that passes, I get closer to my husband and my little girl again.’ I immediately wrote her.”

And on Aug. 30 she went back.

“A friend went along. We stayed at a hotel but spent a lot of time with her both days,” she says, “planting and talking, having tea on the sun porch and sharing pictures.

“A nurse staying with her took a picture of us together. She had really wasted away. Mentally she was as sharp as a tack. She wouldn’t ride in a wheelchair but would push it for support.”

Before they left, she took Patti to her closet and loaded her with clothes.

“She was a little petite lady. I’m much larger, but she said maybe there was someone I could give them to.

“When we left, I told her, ‘I’ve got all your clothes in the car. Just go with me.’ But she hugged me and patted my cheek and said when she was gone, she was going to look after me. I was thinking she was going to put a good word in for me with the Big Man, and I said, ‘I need all the help I can get.’ She just kind of laughed and patted my cheek. I was thinking she meant she’d be my guardian angel, and I thought, ‘Well, she’ll be a good one.’

“And she had put together this little box of stuff she thought I might want — her husband’s pocket watch and old coins and things like that.” And some pictures of her and her husband in their early days in Chicago where he was in real estate.

“She said, ‘You’re the kind of person this might mean something to.’ ”

And Patti came home.

“And then someone called me and told me she had passed away that day. It was Sept. 30, one month to the day from when we were there.

“There was no service. She was being cremated. No place to send flowers. They flew her remains to Chicago to be with her husband and her little girl.”

But her favorite color was pink, and Patti had planted some pink day lilies when she was down there.

“Just kind of knowing that helped me get through it.”

And the shock came a couple of months later when Patti got a letter from a lawyer.

Lila Schenck had left her $20,000 in her will.

She couldn’t even say thank you. Nobody in the family was left.

But she could remember that pat on the cheek during the second visit — and Lila’s promise to look after her, and she and her husband, Lewis Safrit, had those greenhouses back of their house where she potted plants and had some family treasures that had been started in her grandmother’s garden and ...

Was her dream of a greenhouse and garden shop about to come true?

She had been the school representative for Coca-Cola for 15 years and passed a little gray building with a white picket fence that she loved on her way back and forth to work every day. It used to be Dr. Bob Curl’s chiropractic office.

“I always looked at the ‘For Lease’ sign in the window,” and thought about how perfect it would be for a shop and greenhouses.

And she hardly had to think about what she wanted to do with the money.

She’d sent pictures of her greenhouses to Lila and wrote that someday she hoped they’d grow into a garden shop.

“She really encouraged me,” Patti says. “And $20,000 was enough to get started. You’d still have to work hard, but it would open the doors and get it rolling.”

She’d quit her job and devote full time to the garden shop. Lewis would stay with his night job at GE but help the rest of the time, and he started immediately.

“He came home one day,” Patti says, “and said, ‘I thought of the name — Bloomers.’ I loved it. Then he came in and said, ‘I thought of a slogan — Business is Blooming.’ I thought, ‘He can’t be two for two.’ ”

But why not? He’s already two for two.

“He’s my best friend and my partner,” she says. “It never would have happened without all his hard work. We leased it and moved two of our greenhouses here and did a lot of work inside, and it’s going real well.

“It is living a dream. We had hoped to open some day, but we had known the most we could do was sell out of the two greenhouses. What Lila did was let us get on the main road and jump in.

“If someone had told me something like this could happen, I never would have believed it. It’s like one of those things you read that happens to someone else. When I think back to that first letter about BVD underwear ... ”