Friday Favorites-Firsties

My friend Hillary over at The Other Mama started a "Friday Favorites" carnival, so, being true to my Irish roots (A day late & a dollar short), I'm joining up TWO weeks late. But, luckily for me, the party happens every Friday. Woot! (I'm going to use this as a way to get better at inserting pictures and links, so this might not be done until Sunday.)

My favorite for today......... Daffodils!

I ADORE daffodils. Here in the South, they are, I think, the first flowers of spring. Not flowering tree or shrub, but a realio, trulio poesy. Even if the calendar still says winter, and for once the weather agrees (like this year,) they start pushing their leaves up the end of January to start blooming no later than March. I've had daffodils for Valentine's Day once. As a little girl in Georgia, I'd get excited when my mom's daffodils came up, even if there was ice on the puddles. As a teen in Germantown, I'd often walk through an old farmstead, and where the house once stood, was a naturalized profusion of daffodils there under the oak grove-- golden ones, pale ones with apricot cups, double-doubles so frilly they looked like pompoms. It was very much what I believe heaven might look like. I only picked one out of every four, but I still came home with my arms over-flowing. Even my parents have memories of seeing walk into the house covered in daffodils; we had flowers in every room. I even dug some bulbs to plant. I wish I'd dug more, picked more.

The old farm is now a luxury golf-course and millionaires' row, with all the top soil stripped away. The daffodils are gone, except for the ones the gardeners plant every year, and then dig up for the next month's display. My parents sold the house, and I do not know if the new owner changed the flower beds. But I have my own daffodils! On my wall hangs a Gayle Strider print of daffodils in a vase, and in my kitchen vase are some I gathered from my own growing beds-- some from the previous owners, some thinned from other's gardens. To my beds, I have added jonquils, narcissus, hyacinth, star of Bethlehem, Easter lilies and spider lilies. But of all these, my daffodils are my first, my favorites.

"And then my heart with pleasure fills, And dances with the daffodils."

The Daffodils W. Wordsworth