We had a hard winter this year. I live in Georgia, so a hard winter for us was two weeks of below freezing weather and 48 hours of snow on the ground. I loved it! (Not the cold, the snow.) Sometimes I long for the days in Pennsylvania when we got three feet of snow (or more) and the wind blew the drifts across our little country lane and rendered the road impassable. I loved it when I was a kid, because that meant no school.
When I grew up and had the responsibility of a job it wasn’t as much fun. I had to dig the car out, clean the snow off the windshield, and hope I could get out of my driveway. That’s assuming the main roads were passable. If they weren’t, I just went back to bed.
In the midst of all this stress I find myself looking for signs of spring. Of course, in Pennsylvania I didn’t start looking until April. I like looking for signs of spring in February as I often do here in Georgia. I was excited to see my first robin two weeks ago.
But what excites me the most is seeing my first daffodil. The one in the picture surprised me last week. What a pick-me-up! Suddenly life seemed a little brighter.
Daffodils just look so happy. Some people look for the tulips, crocuses or hyacinths, but give me the daffodil. It’s become my tradition to take a photo of my first daffodil bloom each year and share it online. I could say I wanted to share the joy, but I can’t deny part of my motivation was to rub it in to my snow-bound friends and family in the north.
In a few weeks I’ll have daffodils showing their happy faces in all my garden beds, and that will make me very happy. I wish they lasted longer. The saddest part of spring is when the daffodils are over, and I have to wait another year to see them again. Of course, by that time my other flowers are starting to bloom, so I can deal with it.
I inherited my love of flowers from my Mom. Our yard back home in Pennsylvania was filled with flowers. She had a fenced-in flower bed, and every out-building on our farm had flowers growing around them. When she ran out of buildings she used three old tractor tires to make additional beds at strategic points in the yard. She wasn’t done yet – every row of our vegetable garden had a three-foot space at top and bottom where she planted even more flowers. My dad protested in vain that you can’t eat flowers. She just shrugged and said, “No, but they look pretty.”
That was the exterior of the house. Inside you could find potted plants on many windowsills, and we had a “porch room.” Many, many years ago it was part of the porch that wrapped around the house. Then someone decided to close it in to make an extra room. It should have been called the flower room because the huge windows on two walls made the room ideal for flowers. And flowers there were – on tables and shelves and windowsills.
‘Round about May the potted plants, along with their stands and shelves, made a pilgrimage to the front porch where they could enjoy the outdoors. Sometime in September they all returned to their places in the porch room, safe from the cold and snow.
My thumb isn’t quite as green as Mom’s was. Indoor plants aren’t fond of me, so I’ve confined myself to the outdoor kind. Since moving to Georgia I’ve done my best to fill the yard with the colors Mom enjoyed so much. Most of my beds have turned into perennial beds. I like the growth that returns every year with a minimal amount of work on my part. I especially like plants that spread, and all my beds have inherited “babies” from periwinkles, lemon balm, monkey grass and more.
The blooming daffodils provide us with a sign of spring, but there’s more to these happy faces than I ever knew. Your grandma may have called them narcissus or jonquils. They’re all in the same family. In fact, there are at least 15 different species. Know anyone with a 10th wedding anniversary coming up? The daffodil is the official flower. On the other hand the sap in their stem is poisonous to other plants. And to animals. Did you ever notice that squirrels don’t chow down on your daffodils?
We don’t usually think about origin stories when it comes to flowers, but we can trace daffodils back about 2,000 years. It’s believed that the Romans brought the daffodil to the British Isles when they crossed the channel in the first century A.D., and the lovely bloom is the official flower of Wales. America had to wait till the early 1700s for the flowers to make it to our shores.
I’m glad they finally made it. So ignore the groundhog. Look for the daffodils and do a little happy dance for them!
If you are winter-weary or discouraged, allow me to leave you with a verse of encouragement.
And why do you worry about clothes? Observe how the wildflowers of the field grow: They don’t labor or spin thread. Yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendor was adorned like one of these. If that’s how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today and thrown into the furnace tomorrow, won’t he do much more for you—you of little faith? Matthew 6:28-30