March

…and all the daffodils

March is a month thrown into an ocean of daffodils. Their golden coronas meet the rising sun every morning, blurring the line where earth ends and sky begins.

When I moved here, some twenty five years ago, place was already full of daffodils. “Barbara”, the nearly mythical creature, threw a bucketful of daffodil bulbs into nearby woods. It happened to be on a slope and rainwater took them everywhere. Simple yellow, most nostalgic variety, from the time when flowers, stories, recipes, and kittens were shared between neighbors and never bought. The kind that you see on a drive through a countryside near ruins of foundations where houses once stood, and sometimes even foundations are not there anymore. Along with peonies and lilacs, daffodils are survivors, land markers, and storytellers.

In my previous life as a flower farmer I planted dozens more varieties of daffodils here, some fancy frilly ones, and some slender and elegant whites. Season starts with simple heirloom yellow daffodils, these are the bravest of souls. Then mid season varieties kick into their blooming power, they’re bigger, heavier, bombastic with spring rain and sunshine pouring upon them without being obscured by hydrangeas nearby that didn’t leaf out yet, and then the late ones, finishing up with most intoxicatingly fragrant Poet’s daffodil blooming when nights are warm and full of bats and mosquitoes.

Sometimes I think about people who will come to live here after us.  I entertain myself imagining that they would move here in a winter, with gardens surrounding this old house quiet in frozen slumber. And one early morning in March they would wake up to a riot of yellow outside. You have no idea where daffodils are for the most of the year, they stay hidden, like they don’t even exist, but when they hear that golden chime they wake up and throw spring’s gates wide open.

And garden bursts into flowers.

Happy spring friends, enjoy the daffodils.

I will see you again in April, month of purple lilacs.

And again in May, the month of peonies.

All the beautiful, nostalgic blooms, so intertwined with our lives that childhood can’t be remembered without them.

Engulfing roadsides, city streets, farmyards in color, fragrance, vibrancy.

Traveling through our deepest memories.

Nonnative to this country, all immigrants from other continents.

Like me.

Like almost all of us, who knew it before but now forgot it.

Our absence won’t enrich anyone because no one achieves greatness by subtraction.