Daffodil Season Already?

 That might be almost two months early; maybe there was a warm micro-climate beside the building that had brought them out early, I thought.  But the next day my wife informed me that the daffodils were also up in our back yard, and that the deer were eating them-would I get out the deer repellent and spray?  When I headed out to apply the blood meal/rotten egg essence, I found that daffodils were sprouting all over the place, in nearly all our many beds. 

It's been a nice winter, with lots of unusually warm weather since the big storm of early December.  I had wondered at the time if that would be the coldest weather we saw all winter, and it might still be.  But a more likely fate is that the daffodils will come up too early and be nipped back by a spell of cold weather.  That won't be serious unless it catches them in bloom, where cold could wreck them and the much anticipated color of our spring.  If you're like me, you're filing away more evidence of global warming.  I haven't gotten around to seeing "An Inconvenient Truth" yet but I guess I don't need much convincing anyway.

There was a time when I thought awfully hard about growing daffodils as a life path and I'm not entirely sure what ever happened to that.  I guess I must have thought it was impractical, but I have continued to dabble with them from time to time through the years, ever since my first job working on a daffodil farm.  It was The Daffodil Mart in Gloucester, Virginia and I worked there from age 13 through my graduation from high school.  I fell in love with daffodils and had my own collection, especially of the types from Division 9, the Poeticus varieties.  My mom dug up the whole collection and sent it to me in Minnesota, but I could not keep them alive there.

When we moved to Missouri a few years back, growing these early-spring flowers seemed possible again, especially after I found that the old species variety Trumpet Major was naturalized on roadsides and old home sites throughout the region.  I had stayed in touch from time to time with my old boss Brent Heath, who had tried to get out of growing daffodils at one time, only to find his way back in with an even bigger company now known as Brent & Becky's Bulbs.  My first look at their catalog completely hooked me to all the old memories and my Spanish Club even started planting some on our school grounds to provide spring beauty.  I've lost track of how many beds we have planted at home now.

Which all leads me to thinking about how life here at the beginning of the 21^st century is just odd.  I can still see and hear the descriptions of how wonderful life was going to become, as they depicted it back in the 60s.  The efficiency of life was going to become so intense that we would have loads of leisure time for enjoying daffodils or whatever else took our fancy.  We have lots of that efficiency, but we didn't count on the strange complexity of life that we feel all around us now.  It takes so much planning to organize our lives these days and figure out what to do with all the money we have, or how to get more and how to be sure that we'll have enough later when we retire to a world where everybody needs a lot more money all the time.  They didn't tell us that we would have these worries about how to stay healthy enough to enjoy our long lives or protect ourselves from terrorists.  My life is deeply occupied by these annoying complexities that eat my leisure time.

And of course no one knew that it would all be overlaid with the question of the seasons changing, in such dramatic ways that even our life-long expectations of when spring should bloom now have to shift.  One could easily become fixated on these things and allow them to change a hopeful view of life's possibilities into pessimism, but in all likelihood the flowers will bloom and there will be time for twilight walks down the road to see and smell them and generally remember how blessed we are to live on this amazing planet.