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.

The Winter That Never Ended

Yesterday, I put on my shoes and a jacket and mumbled, "Gotta go outside so I can write about it later." I sat on the garden swing for a half-hour, and a couple of goldfinches fought over the remaining seeds in the feeder on the pussywillow tree.

"What am I going to write about?" I asked them. It seems I've reached that point of the semester when assignments are burdens, books are dead weights with print that bounces off the surface of my memory. Ideas are fleeting.

When we moved in here, the house was on a corner of two roads. About ten years ago, a new (third) road was put in between my house and my neighbors', setting my family's property on a peninsula of grass and giving access to the backhoes that dug up the woods and planted suburban fake-estates in its place.

Behind me, beyond the fence along the new road, the sound of cars blended with the sound of the wind. The gray oily clouds gnashed and whirrled in the sky. Last week, I could hear the grass growing as spring rainwater trickled into the cracks in our clay soil. Yesterday, I just sat there getting cold.

"What am I going to write about?"

I kicked at the mulch under the garden swing and noticed the trees on the hill across the hollow. They're just as stick-y and dark as they've been all winter, but it looked like someone had spilled a little white and a little red on their branches. A little cloud of color. A smudge on my glasses.

The color of spring is yellow. Yellow crocuses, yellow daffodils, yellow buds on the bush by the garden shed that I can't identify. Yellow pollen on the pussywillow, yellow goldfinches.

A few months ago, I dreaded the spring. I couldn't conceive of a bright and cheery season when I was so sad. But I'm sick of being sad. I'm sick of cold winds and heavy skies. I want the weather to pick me up and carry me away from grief.

I left the swing, checked out the baby daffodils behind the garden shed, peeked in on the redbud tree my mom and I planted a couple weeks ago, and returned to the house.

An hour later, it started to snow.


:30°F:
:dark and cloudy sky:

Storm Petrels in Portugal

Look what I get to do in June!


These little birds -- Storm Petrels or "Stormies" -- have fascinating migratory routes, and like many sea birds, seldom come to land. A Rocha Portugal, an environmental conservation organization, is tracking these Stormies to learn more about climate change and its impact on marine life.

Now, I should add that I know next to nothing about how to catch, ring, and release wild birds, but I do know how to be quiet and observe what's happening around me. And that's just what I intend to do this June when I spend a week with A Rocha, so that I can write about my experiences when I get home!

Excited? Of course! As much as I love my backyard, it's been four years since I've been to Europe, and ages since I've done much of anything truly exciting. Like the Stormies, it's time for me to follow my migratory route eastward and over the ocean.

Life to Its Fullest

In my opinion, the biggest problem with our society today is that no one stops long enough to notice or appreciate anything. We are in such a hurry to live life to the fullest that we miss out on a lot of things in the process.
- my classmate Amanda, in her post yesterday, which, itself, was in response to Pam's post

Living life to its fullest: what does that really mean? I love that Amanda used this phrase in contrast with the idea of not missing out on things. Typically, the two ideas are synonymous these days, but I agree that maybe they shouldn't be.

For the past week in class, we've discussed Native perspectives on nature, the idea that "wilderness" was a European fantasy and that in Native reality, wilderness was simply here, the same as everywhere else. What we are often tempted to call Childlike Wonder, should simply be the way we see, shouldn't it?

Why, do you think, we call it Acting Like an Adult when we stop noticing the everyday miracles?

I think it's because we're trying to justify actions--ignorance--that we know are wrong. My goals for my life each day include finding time to see, time to simply be here, whether it's among trees or inside my house or on a city street. To work hard and enjoy my work. To notice the everyday miracles.

In depleting our lives of the constant (pointless) demands we somehow think are important, we can free up our lives, slow down the pace, and make the time to fill our lives with the wonder of what we have sadly stopped seeing all around.

Grasping Vapor

When I was a little girl, I used to lie in the grass and stare at the sky, finding faces and animals and entire stories up there in the vaporous clouds. It’s a common childhood pastime, nothing unique, but I still love doing it all the same.

When I was in high school, I took a course on Astronomy, this time focusing on another kind of vaporous body in another kind of sky: the stars at night. Learning constellations and star names based on ancient civilizations’ own words for the shapes and faces and stories of the sky, was almost as exciting as coming up with my own.

What is it about the sky that draws me toward it? Its endless space? Its provision? Its possibilities? True, the mysteries of our own ocean floors outnumber the mysteries of outer space, but to this landlocked Pennsylvanian, the sky is an immediate reminder of all we still don’t know.

The sky, made of gasses and vapors; the clouds, water and dust; the stars, vaporous fire; and the planets and moons, reflections of light.

Although there are solids out there—the terra firma of certain planets, meteors, moons—most of outer space is just that: space. From the vapors of Earth’s atmosphere to the gasses of the Sun, most of what we see in the sky is made up of uncertainties. “How do you catch a cloud and pin it down?” sing Maria’s sisters in The Sound of Music. How do you hold a piece of the sky?

I wonder, if the sky and its clouds and stars and planets, were a character, what would the character be like? I once read a Snohomish story about humans and animals working together to push up the sky. In it, the sky wasn’t a character as much as a problem to be solved. Legends about the night sky call it a place, not a person. But what kind of person would it be?

I think the sky is unknowable, and despite our telescopes and rockets and space stations, the sky will always be a mysterious place, a place outside of us that is as inscrutable as the part of us that’s within. We can label the gaseous elements and trace the planets’ paths, but in the end, even naming something doesn’t mean we’ve figured it out.

Backyard Healing

You might be surprised to learn that, for all I like to preach about the healing properties of nature, I seldom believe them, myself, when I really need them.

Like yesterday. It was a bad day. "Bad," as in (1) I am desperate to find time to go visit the friends in Baltimore whom I terribly miss, (2) I've reached the point in the semester when nothing I write has any future beyond the paper shredder/compost bin, and (3) we received notice from the county yesterday telling us they're changing our house number (... since it hasn't been functioning properly for the past twenty years?).

I took a moment from the Essays That I Wish Would Write Themselves to go to the kitchen and refill my water bottle, when I realized it was 6:00 and almost sunset. I hemmed. I hawed. I reeeeeally needed to work on those essays. I reeeeally didn't feel like taking off my slippers. I reeeeeally wasn't in the mood to put on extra layers to go outside, after the past four or five months of the cold. In the end, I left my water bottle on the counter, my Microsoft Word window open (it was blank anyway, not like it's going anywhere), and pulled on a pair of boots and a jacket.

The black-capped chickadees behind the garden shed welcomed me with chirping, and the hill of neighbors' lawns behind the house are greener by the day. It was cold, so cold, but after moving around the yard for a little bit, I felt warmer, and I thought of the line in Die Lorelei: Der Luft ist kuhl und es dunkelt (the air is cool and it's growing darker).

The wookiee, thrilled to have someone outside with him, popped out of a bush and grabbed my ankle before running across the yard. He's getting older now, and I'm not in very good shape either, so we gave up the game of tag after a few more minutes. I took some veggie peels to the compost bin and watched the clouds puff across the eastern sky like exhaust from a steam engine, tried to find the source of a unique bird call, and eventually returned to the house when it got too dark and too cool to merit remaining outside.

What's more: I felt better. Whether the essays write themselves or not, they'll get written. They may not be any good by finals week, but they'll stick around until I'm ready to revise them in another year or two. My friends will always welcome me in Baltimore, and the end of the semester (and along with it, some free time) is coming nearer so I can afford to see them again. And you know, even if they're changing my house's identity, they can't change the house. The yard is not defined by the number on my mailbox, and this weekend, that is the most important part of this little wedge of land.

:45°:
:partly cloudy skies:

The Sky Is Raining

When I was twelve, I wrote a story, and in it, the main character/narrator says something to the effect of the following (although I don't remember word for word): I began to think about the weather. Not a thrilling topic, I know, but one which has a big effect on all our lives.

Literature, movies, and music have been using weather to their advantage for centuries, probably longer, to the point that groups like Flight of the Conchords spoof weather images:

I'm not crying
It's just been raining
on my face.

No matter how long the weather has been used in art, however, it should never really get old. The weather really does affect our moods, and sometimes, it truly reflects them.

My classmate Amanda wrote about this in a recent blog post, and as she sat in a gloomy evening of a gloomy day, she says, "For once, nature was the rational being."

Sometimes, that's why I like nature so much. It reminds me what reality is, connects me back to the world, gets me out of myself. I commend Amanda's choice to retreat to nature on an undeniably bad day. And I hope she has many more sunny skies on the horizon.