The Early Show hosts welcomed spring with the NYC crowd amid falling snow this morning. In Indiana this morning was cold but we had lots of sunshine. The daffodils hang their heads in the cold but by late morning had all perked up, their heads once again raised to the warm sunshine.
For St. Patrick's Day, I bought a 99-cent bunch of King Edward daffodils and stuck them with more blooms from the garden for my dinner table that evening. Daffodils, more so even than tulips, for me signify spring. They recall William Wordsworth's lines:
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.
Miss Ardeño, petite and pretty-as-a-picture, taught freshman English at the old ICC campus in La Paz where I grew up. To entice us to love literature, she taught the poem to music that effortlessly plays in my head now whenever I think of daffodils. Tradition claims that Wordsworth wrote the lines after he and his sister, Dorothy, came across a mass of daffodils by Lake Ullswater on April 15, 1802. Dorothy later wrote in her journal:
"...they grew among the mossy stones about and about them, 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 that blew upon them over the lake..."
When we're alone, in bed upon first opening our eyes to another morning, or sitting at the lake pondering the newest gaggle of geese a-visiting, where do our thoughts go? Feeling quiet and peaceful we might recollect images from those faraway, long-ago days when the world was still largely a figment of our dreams and desire, and life stretched ahead of us deliciously, like a never-ending stream of daffodils.
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