I saw my first daffodils over the week-end when my friend Marilyn and I went for our first walk in months. It was so warm I did not need my coat! However, I did not take my camera because I wasn’t prepared to see any flowers.
A few days earlier, my classmate and “poet-in-residence,” Mary Lou Meyers, sent me a poem about daffodils. I looked through my pictures of the recent Philadelphia Flower Show and found one picture of daffodils, pictured here. The theme was Holland: Flowering the World and there were thousands of tulips, but I did find some daffodils.
So here is Mary Lou’s poem and my “indoor” daffodils. Once Spring has finally blossomed, I can take outdoor photos of all the flowers. Thanx, Mary Lou!
Daffodils Came to Call
by Mary Lou Meyers
I yearned for something bright
to cover the unsightly landscape
plagued with the blight of a winter
which never came with its heaping dose of snow
like slow growing manure awakening the roots
to the incipient stirrings of Spring
which had only a tentative hold
now in the cold
and forgot how to sing out
in this unnatural calendar
with so many doubts.
Until the outlandish creek came to call,
both thief and peddler
leaving deposits of leaves;
beneath were bulbs unseen by human eyes
until a bright yellow loving cup dotted the landscape
which defied the carefully planted blossoms
which rose up and died in the ripping cold.
P.S. This is probably my last posting for March. I totally forgot March was Women’s History Month, so I apologize. I recently received a solicitation from the women’s museum-in-the works in Washington, D.C., so I may post something about that on the 31st.
Daffodils are blooming on the side of my house. They are the only flowering plants that I maintain, and they have a history: MANY years ago, when there were county-based Douglass Alumnae Clubs throughout NJ, (I think it was) the Somerset County Douglass Alumnae Club that sold bulbs from Holland as their fundraiser in support of scholarships at the College. Their fundraising project is the source of my ever blooming daffodils — a Spring greeting, and a special reminder of alma mater.