“Why do you love daffodils so much?”

My kids and I find car rides provide the best opportunity to speak of matters both trivial and profound. My middle child comes up with great challenges like:

What animal do you think I would be if I weren’t a human?

What color would you be…other than purple?

What three animal features would make up my superhero character, and what would my superpower be?

The other day, she asked which flower I thought she would be and which I thought I would be. For her, I picked dahlias for their abundant, lavish flowers that come in a vast array of colors. Their big, bold, yet silent declarations of beauty and joy match her personality well. 

For me, I chose the daffodil, particularly the heirloom variety found on our roughly 225-year-old farm. Their yellow blooms proclaim the first hint of spring around the time of my birthday and smell of sunshine. Early settlers on our land planted them outside their homes, and though the humans returned to the dust many years ago, the bulbs they planted continue to burst forth with bright color and sweet aroma to beseech the longer days and warmer temperatures to hasten their arrival.

To me, these little plants carry sunshine upwards from the cold, hardened earth in the winter months when we need it most. I relish that they usually arrive just before Ash Wednesday to help cut the melancholy of the bleak midwinter. I need the promise they bear that the darkness is passing and the heat of summer will come, so be patient. 

I adore Christmas and all of its loud, clanging chaos. I despise taking down my decorations (always long past Epiphany!) and can’t bear to return the last box to the attic until it’s time to bring down Easter decorations. In fact, even now, a box remains on my porch and one in my living room. I use the excuse that I continue to find small red and green decorations and tidbits that need to be added to the box, but truthfully, I hate to let the season go until bunnies and painted eggs arrive to fill the void.

January arrives like the grumpy cousin, late to the party and determined to ruin everyone’s fun. Nothing good happens in January. I think it will be a quiet month of rest and recovery from the December mayhem, but somehow, I end up busy all the same but without the bells and bows, only dark grey skies and brown all around. 

But then, when I feel the weight of seasonal affective disorder might become too heavy, I walk on a warmer day to see little green swords piercing the hard, brown earth. They join forces with their neighbors to push with a collective charge, up and out for the world to witness their triumph. The buds follow, making themselves known, and yellow begins to peep through the green until one day, I look to find a handful of daffodils in full bloom, grinning widely with sweet-scented breath in defiance of the dank rank of mold and decay.

When my middle child asked why I love daffodils so much, I told her that the flower reminds me that growth happens even when we think everything sleeps. While we think the world rests in its winter boredom, under the ground, sprouts crack their seed’s shell and begin their movement out and up. Sometimes, the earth’s and our most important growth happens when we’re resting.

I feel myself in a season of invisible growth, like the daffodil in January. I don’t know what sort of flower will bloom, what scent it will release into the air, or the shape or shade of it. It feels as though my mind and body have shut down to hibernate, but under the surface, I sense the roots forming, sending tendrils into the soil of my lived experience and learned lessons. Something finds purchase in my soul, and I have a growing awareness of its determined development deep within me. I hear the daffodil’s censure: Be patient.

I give thanks for those marvelous yellow blooms, for they remind me that when I think nothing is happening, to expect sunshine in the middle of winter, to stop and marvel at the rhythms of the season, and to let go of guilt when I need rest for it may be in that rest that the better, more beautiful bloom takes its form.

I leave you with this beautiful ode to the daffodil by Wordsworth:

I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud by William Wordsworth

I wandered lonely as a cloud

That floats on high o’er vales and hills,

When all at once I saw a crowd,

A host, of golden daffodils;

Beside the lake, beneath the trees,

Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine

And twinkle on the milky way,

They stretched in never-ending line

Along the margin of a bay:

Ten thousand saw I at a glance,

Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

The waves beside them danced; but they

Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:

A poet could not but be gay,

In such a jocund company:

I gazed—and gazed—but little thought

What wealth the show to me had brought:

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.