Daffodil

As I sit in mid-April, it’s been a good year for daffodils. They came up on time, but cool weather has kept them at peak form for weeks. Drifts of yellow cover patches of yards and hills. A complement to the also abundant forsythia. Golden spring with winter wind. 

Now the magnolias and cherries are beginning to spot the landscape with pink and white fluffs. Green leaves remain future visions, the background is blue sky, brown trunks and leaf litter, emerald lawns. 

I know daffodils are not native to Long Island. I’ll never know what was here a thousand years ago, nor even what Thoreau and Whitman might have seen. But the bulbs have naturalized completely, like the rest of us immigrants, and they do their part in spreading beauty. 

I’m grateful that so far the displays around here are pretty public. Daffodils do not hide behind the bricks of high walled private gardens. They crowd roadsides and parks. Even if a child plants a few somewhere, they may come back or even multiply for decades. 

I don’t want to make more of this than it is. The great meaning is simply the wonderful moment of existence, my appreciation to be part of it. Others may spin stories, and moral tales, and metaphors. I just like looking.

Soon enough this display will be over for another year. But wow – what a few weeks it has been!