Daffs

I opened the kitchen door this morning and realized that night-time showers have begun to green the garden.  I tried to deconstruct the smell of a chilly morning.  Cold isn't a scent yet the 30º smells cold.  A bit tangy, spicy.  The scene is a simple one:  a row of daffodils blooming their little hearts out over by the stone wall, still-empty flower pots newly set out, evidence of buds on the lilac bush, the satisfaction of having finished my spring-raking.

"Hi, Guys.  You're so beautiful," I tell two daffodils--a double white with a rain-muddied face that I picked and washed.  And a double orange that was bent over, hiding its beauty.  Now clean and perky--both in a vase where I can talk to them when I stand at the kitchen sink.

Wordsworth's most famous poem is "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud," written after he and his sister Dorothy went out walking one April day in 1802 and came upon what Dorothy called "a long belt" of daffodils. Here is the first stanza:

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.

Though the poem is her brother's, Dorothy wrote in her journal that "some rested their heads upon these stones as on a pillow for weariness and the rest tossed and reeled and danced and seemed as if they verily laughed with the wind" (1).  A local friend notified me recently that one of our town's hosts of daffodils is now in bloom:

 

Accented with these sunny splotches of pure yellow, a green haze begins filling the land.  As if blowing up balloons, putting out decorative streamers, taking freshly-baked cookies out of the oven, it feels like party time.  Time to celebrate the fact that we are (hurray!) entering one of the year's two most beautiful seasons.  In their own party hats, violets, dandelions, and tulip trees will soon be joining the fun.

This may look like a poem, but it isn't.  It's my April list.

Or, What makes April April.

Packets of seeds are now sold in the stores

Along with the first flats of flowers--pansies

Daffodils bloom

And forsythia

The last of the snow melts

We rake our gardens

And, rather than a chore, spring cleaning feels like getting spiffed up for a new year

(1)  "The Grasmere Journal" (Thursday, April 15, 1802), Dorothy Wordsworth