You Say Tomato, I Say Daffodil

Spring is not really my favorite time of year, but it is a close second.  I like the fall.  Spring does have, however, much to recommend it.  We all come out of winter dazed, hungry for the sight of green, ready to shed coats and start living outdoors again.

As I drive around in spring (and my drives usually include detours and "shortcuts" down little travelled roads) I keep an eye out for those early harbingers of spring, the first sign that we are really leaving winter behind: daffodils.

I'm not talking about those well-tended daffodils that crop up in flower boxes and beds in inhabited houses.  I like those daffodils that come up by abandoned houses, or in places where no sign of a house remains except those happy-seeming ghosts of homesteads past.

I have seen foundations easily over a hundred years old surrounded by daffodils.  I have seen daffodils in corners of fields, still growing in a straight line that has to represent a flowerbed long since decayed along with the hand that once tended it. 

It may seem this essay has taken a turn for the morbid, turned to death and decay, but the history of the daffodil supports a turn like that.  Daffodils, known to the ancient Greeks as asphodel, were said to grow on the banks of one of the rivers in Hades, planted by Persephone after she was abducted.  They lift the spirits of the dead.  Because of this, they were often planted on graves.

And now they mark the graves of old farmhouses, long since gone.  They bloom so early in spring that often all about them is still sere and brown, still too new from the harshness of winter to show the signs of stirring growth.  But who could look at the happy yellow of the bloom while pondering the disappearance of the past and not feel, if not cheerful, then nostalgic?  If those blooms can raise the dead, then they can surely raise the spirits of the living.

We are still here; we are still walking around, and we need those daffodils to pull our flagging spirits out of the doldrums of February, through the storms of March, and push us forward into the full bloom of spring.  Daffodils represent the gateway, the way back, the rebirth of the year.  William Wordsworth hit the nail on the head when he wrote:

"For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils."