April Flowers

We have had our share of April showers this week. Thursday and Friday were two long days of intermittent rain, hail, and wind, broken occasionally by short, unpredictable periods of surprising sunlight. The good news is, we have not had to wait until May for flowers.

Glorious daffodils sprouted suddenly almost everywhere I looked this week: along fences, around streetlights, in front of driveway marker stones, and then, most surprisingly of all, across the street at the end of our driveway, behind a fence in the treed barrier between our condo development and the strip mall parking lot to the south. We fell in love with that area the first time that we saw the house, but that was last September, when the area was lush with green, from low brush to high broadleaved trees, and you never would guess that there was a commercial development so close. During the winter, and since we moved in, the trees have been bare of leaves, and while that opens the sky to light and a view, I am also looking forward to the natural green curtain. So when we were returning from a short walk to the drugstore on Saturday afternoon, I was astonished to see a few clumps of green hidden behind the wooden fence, almost down the embankment to the tiny stream separating the two properties. Then I saw that the green clumps were supporting stems of paperwhite daffodils, all standing proudly and facing south, away from view.

How odd to plant the daffodils on the other side of the fence, I thought, and then I wondered whether there had been a fence there when they were planted, and who had put in the bulbs. Was it our next door neighbor whom we have chatted with from time to time, who is one of the original owners in this almost 30-year-old community, or was it the lady who had lived in our house, the third owner and now dead for somewhat over a year? I like to think the latter, and I hope she had at least one season to enjoy the fruits of her labor before passing. I give thanks and acknowledge that she could never have imagined how much joy they would bring to this new owner, recently moved from Spain, where she had not seen daffodils growing naturally in soil for more than ten years.