daffodils are survivors

Daffodils are survivors.  There they stand, cheerful, faithful , year after year, decade after decade, long after any trace of the house that was once there has disappeared. 
Daffy-down-dilly
Has come to town
With a yellow petticoat
And a pretty green gown.
 The frilly old fashioned ones that really do look like  Daffy down Dilly's petticoat can be found in the woods, each spring, where there is nothing but them, and I wonder, how they got there.   I fancy that they were planted in line of sight of the kitchen window, a real treat for the housewife, that splash of color after months of snow and mud, wood ashes and icey paths. No rodent or other creature will eat them, they are nearly disease free, and very toxic.  But the fragrance is subtle and refreshing.

The following  pictures are the decedents

of bulbs planted behind a barbershop and candy store in the late 1940s, I am told the original were all the same color, white. There are drifts of them to be found through this and the neighboring townships.  You will see them in long rows, or big clumps. scattered randomly among the trees and in one place even growing up between the railroad ties.  

This makes me wonder if that is why the American Caner Society chose to have Daffodil Day as a fundraiser.  This year is the 100th Anniversary of the American Caner Society, it is also the last year for Daffodil Days.  When one was coming out of the grocery store on a clammy damp early spring day it was a treat to find someone offering bunches of daffodils for a donation to a good cause.  Even though I have a yard full of daffodils.   I always wondered why daffodils, why such a common flower, and then it hit me like a shovel to the head, because they are survivors.

The flowers that have outlasted whoever planted them, sometimes even the memory of who ever planted them.  The flowers that put a splash of color  to the gray and clammy Spring day when a housewife felt like  the sun would never shine again.  and when she hung the laundry in  to dry in the fresh summer breeze, they nodded approval.



Every little once in awhile I see a lone and lonely daffodil, and wonder how it got there. 

Some even mark where  family member were once  buried, now long forgotten by everyone but the daffodils.