Reflections on the Second Week of Spring - Daffodil Walk

    While the sun played peek-a-boo among gray clouds Monday afternoon, I pulled on mud boots for another daffodil walk.

    These walks are a March–April tradition because, unlike Christmas or Valentine’s Day with fixed dates, the first daffodil bloom varies from March 16 to April 16 at Wells Wood.

    I checked daffodils from bulbs Spence’s mom had planted and Aunt Marge had sent. The plants sported swollen buds with tinges of yellow but no open flowers.

    Then I squished through the woods and up a rise.

    Eleven tete a tete daffodil flowers greeted me. The flowers bloomed among yellow buds in nine clusters of six inch high daffodils growing in a twenty-five foot arc at the edge of a slope overlooking Deer Creek.

    As if someone had fired a starting pistol, I whooped and, carefully, raced over slippery spring mud to the log house and my computer. “WE HAVE DAFFODILS!” I typed in an email to the Wells family with a invitation for a daffodil walk–especially for my sister-in-law Cindy.

    Would she make it in time this year?

    I’d planted the tete a tete bulbs November 21, 2004 in memory of her mom. Every spring since, I’d emailed Cindy with the news of the first bloom in the hopes she could drive up from Pittsburgh to see the flowers. Most years our schedules didn’t mesh. Twice, she arrived to withering flowers. Only once, in 2009, did she see the yellow array at peak. “They are smaller and more numerous than I imagined,” she’d said.

    This past Tuesday, Cindy emailed back. “Bruce [Spence’s brother] says Wednesday should work for him, but I will come even if he can't.”

    Unfortunately, Spence’s Tuesday meeting about lead safe housing in Cleveland changed to Wednesday so he was away when Bruce and Cindy arrived.

    Under blue skies with puffy white clouds, wearing mud boots, and carrying three stakes, a mallet, camera, cell phone, quart sized bucket, and scissors, Bruce, Cindy, and I ambled along muddy paths. When we reached the arc of yellow, Cindy whispered, “Oh.”

    Bruce and I stood in silence while she surveyed her mom’s flowers.

    After Cindy took a deep breath, I handed her the scissors and said, “Cut as many as you want.”

    Bending at the waist, Cindy gently separated tangled flower heads.

    I inched down the slope to the creek, waded across the rocky shallows, and crossed the grassy island. Kneeling where the water was close and deep enough for dipping the bucket, I scooped water and carefully, so I didn’t spill any, climbed back to Cindy. “You can put the flowers in here to keep them fresh.”

    Cindy tucked six flower heads around the edge of the bucket. “I don’t want them to drown.”

    With cell phone and camera, Bruce and I took photos. He contented himself with wide angle photos of people and flowers. I wanted daffodils. The inch and a half wide flowers on slender stalks bent towards the ground. To try for their faces, I lay on my stomach.

    Later the three of us would wander off to check woods ponds for frog eggs, crush nineteen dozen chicken egg shells for tomato plant fertilizer, eat homemade chicken pot pie, and chat with Spence when he finally got back from Cleveland. But before we left the daffodils, I asked, “Which cluster would you like for transplanting in Pittsburgh?”

    “The one growing in the path makes sense,” Bruce said. “People will walk on it.”

    “Not on the edge.” I fastened the cap on the camera lens. “Besides, those flowers are easier to see than the cluster in the brush below path.”

    Cindy gazed along the yellow arc and said, “The ones in the brush.”

    With the mallet, I maneuvered through twigs and hammered stakes in the points of a triangle around the flowers she chose.

    Next fall, I’ll dig up the bulbs so that Cindy can plant them at her house. Then every spring, no matter if she makes it to peak tete a tete blooming at Wells Wood or not, she can enjoy fresh, full bloom daffodils planted in memory of her mom.