Dancing With the Daffodils

Outside my window, it's snowing again, but the flakes are swirling around electric yellow daffodils. A few weeks ago, two kids, passing my house on their way home from the bus stop, delivered the daffodils I ordered last month for Daffodil Days. Shortly after those hothouse blossoms drooped in their vase on my desk, the bulbs scattered all over my yard took it upon themselves to shine like droplets of summer. I confess I'm surprised that they're still open; it's been snowing for the past 15 hours or so, and if I were a daffodil, I think I would have closed up by now and retreated to the warmer earth.

But I guess daffodils aren't like that. They seem determined to hearten us this first week of April, every year, no matter where we are. My mom reread her gardening journal last week and laughed to realize that the daffodils have sprouted in our yard the same week every year for the past decade.

And my classmate Johnny sees daffodils in his garden, too, in Newcastle-upon-Tyne. These intrepid little flowers know no boundaries. Even across an ocean, they're rising at the same time. And in England, they may even bloom again in June.

One of my favorite memories from my travels four years ago occurred in Poland during the first week of April. I was in a bus headed for Krakow somewhere between winter and springtime when I learned of the Pope's passing. By the time I arrived in his home city, it was already clothed in mourning. My last day there, his funeral aired on giant screens in and around the city, and thousands watched in respect.

The event cast a pall on the vacation my friends and I had expected to have that week. None of us was Catholic, but all of us respected the devotion the entire city was showing to a man we all thought well of. We wanted to have fun, but we also wanted to respect this moment in history and the memory of a great man.

It was the daffodils that reminded us to hope. With the sound of the funeral mass still ringing in our ears, we came upon a field of daffodils.


There will be grief. There will be sorrow. There will be winter. But all over the world, there will also be transition into summer, and the daffodils won't let go, even in a shower of snow.