It's Spring!

Yay! My favorite time of the year is finally here! I knew it was close a few weeks ago, when the robins arrived. I suspected it was creeping closer when the temperature hit 60 F. Now, it's here, it's here!

The spring flowers are blooming, the trees are budding, the frogs are singing, and the geese are pairing off.

And, even better, my daffodils are alive and sprouting. Our house has always had this particular type of daffodil, that I've never seen anywhere else. It has a double flower - almost looking like a small yellow peony, and is very fragrant. It's also very hardy. When I was a child, Mom thinned them out and ended up with a couple of buckets of bulbs. What she couldn't pawn off on the neighbors was finally tossed into the weeds - a couple of acres of scrub that we just left growing wild. The next spring, and to this day, that area is a blanket of yellow in the spring where the bulbs evaded the bunnies and planted themselves.

These particular blooms always signal spring to me. I can't imagine the season without them. Last year, I asked Mom for some to plant here, in my wee bit of dirt. I picked the bag of bulbs up from her at Labor Day, when she told me that she figured that she wouldn't be able to find them in the fall, so she plucked them out of the ground in the spring, right before their foliage died back. I took them back to Chicago with me, and they sat in that bag for another couple of months before I went outside and buried them in my clay. (One day, I'll get around to amending my 'soil' - poor little plantlets.) I also shared some of them with my gardening friend.

Generally speaking, these bulbs are quite early to break the ground and I've been outside looking for any sign of them for nearly two months now - to no avail. The crocus sprouted, and bloomed. Other people's daffodils sprouted, and bloomed. The tulips and the hyacinth have come up... but not my daffodils. I feared the worst - that being yanked out of the ground in the spring and banished to a paper bag for nearly five months was more than they could stand.

Then I went outside on a blustery day to start clearing the winter junk from my bit of ground and - low and behold - my daffodils had sprouted. When I went home for my birthday, they were barely two inches high - while Mom's are in full glorious bloom. I was so relieved to see them that I didn't even care (or so I told myself) if they didn't bloom this year. When I got back into town, however, the blessed little plants had buds! Every single one of them! Yay! Spring has arrived! And I love every petal of it!