Daffodils

by Fiona Naughton

On an unassuming day in March, demure and entirely typical, a pale yellow daffodil peeked its head from beneath layers of soil. Its entrance into the world was tentative. The sun responded magnanimously, doling out superfluous rays with glee, giving the small little bud a chance to blossom. It grew taller and taller until it captured the gaze of my mother, who, when out for an evening stroll, slowed her pace and clutched her hands to her chest in a moment of exaltation. I could imagine her crouching down, placing the pads of her fingers on the petals, beaming as she felt the first hints of spring in her hands. This was our Groundhog Day. I was inside, practicing addition at the kitchen table, fiddling with the edge of the blue gingham tablecloth and swinging my legs back and forth. But I knew––I knew the minute that the screen door clanged shut, and my mom began rummaging in the hall closet for her gardening shears––that winter was over. 

And so, on quiet weekday afternoons, we began the process of flower picking. When the light filtered haphazardly through the branches of the magnolia trees, I would trot behind my mother, trailing her as she flitted between the flower patches. She had a second sense for where to find them. I was content to follow her aimlessly and swing the woven basket, touching the pieces of straw that had broken from the handle. When she stopped, I would kneel beside her, trying to restrain my breathing. I mirrored her movements, pressing my palm into the ground to brace the weight of my body as I broke a flower from its roots. The stems made soft snaps as I pulled. Gingerly, I laid them in the basket, and one became two, two became twenty. The flowers were pristine, but I was a different story. Tiny rivulets of earth caught the fibers of my jacket and my khakis had permanent grass stains on the knees that the strongest washing machine would be incapable of erasing. No matter. I would have sacrificed every school uniform in the world to watch my mom as she worked, sometimes close to me, sometimes further away. I had never seen anything more beautiful than the back of her head, the pieces of her honey-colored hair glimmering in the hazy sunlight. A whisper of a smile lingered on her lips as she glanced over her shoulder every so often to check that I was still there. 

When the basket was almost full, and when the sky had descended into streaks of brilliant violet, we would look at one another and reluctantly acquiesce. The fields of daffodils seemed formidable, inexhaustible, a thing that my mother and I had forever. It was easy to convince myself that they would be there tomorrow. They had arrived out of nowhere and then multiplied in spades, dotting the expanses of our backyard. They had announced to the elements that frost was forbidden, that down jackets must be banished to some cobwebbed drawer, that hand lotion was a fruitless commodity and chapped lips were a lie we had told ourselves. I was content with this narrative. My mother and I walked up the hill, back to the house, weaving through dense thickets of trees and tangles of bushes with stray strawberries nestled between the branches. The screen door slammed once again; the basket was deposited on the counter. I rushed to the pantry to select one of the porcelain vases that saw day approximately once a year, relics of my grandmother, covered with floral patterns and paintings of bunnies and silver linings that were reserved for daffodil season. The shelves were creaky, but they did little to deter a seven-year-old girl who was practiced in scaling precarious frames, a girl with two sisters. 

A yellow stool, peppered with half-faded stickers of Ariel and remnants of artistic aspirations with Crayola markers, rested against the kitchen sink. I stood on the top step as I washed my hands, and then disembarked, selecting a dish towel from nursery school that hung on the rack. I watched my mother as I dried my hands. She selected a flower from our basket, then hesitated, put it back. She placed a different one in the vase as she tinkered with their stems, stepping back to observe her work, then adjusting the faces of each flower again. She stood before a window that captured the setting sun, silhouetted in front of an aureate world. 

For all of March and most of April, I grew accustomed to the presence of the daffodils. I begged away from our afternoons together, believing that the flowers could be picked the next day, or the next day after that. But as my older sister was fixing the zipper of my dress on Palm Sunday, the flowers said their final goodbyes, wilting from the weight of unfulfilled promises and grandiose expectations for a transitory time on earth. I hardly noticed. I was preoccupied with the roses, who had arrived in blushing starbursts of tangerine and magenta, and the brassy entrance of the Canadian geese, home at long last from their season of migration to the south. It was only when the screen door shut silently, when my mom returned with a nearly-empty basket, when the vases were banished to the pantry’s top shelf, that I became aware of any absence. The yellow-tinted interlude between winter and summer had ended. 

Days stretched longer and longer, and khaki pants became khaki shorts, which also had mysterious, inexplicable grass stains. I grasped tightly to the belief that the flowers would come back, that after an interminable cycle of winter, I would again have those precious moments with my mother, the two of us searching for pockets of gold before they became ubiquitous, before ubiquity had tarnished their perfection. What never disappeared, though, was the kind dexterity of my mother’s hands, the brightness of her hazel eyes as she looked at me from across the kitchen. She would be there, even after the most defiant daffodils had surrendered to the seasons, even after the setting sun had drawn the dark covers of evening.