Bright blear of a sun in a sky more white than blue. Its light reflecting off the window behind me means I am lit on all sides as I peer down at the first, miniature daffodils still in shade.
daffodils
The appeal of a cool, clear morning is beginning to wear as thin as the splay of browning daffodil leaves below the porch. I lapse into fantasies of fog and rain.
Clear and cold. Frost glitters in the low-angled sun. The miniature daffodils are frozen in positions of prayer.
A brief lull in the rain at dawn, darkness full of the sound of rushing water and the dim shapes of the first daffodils, face-down in the dead grass.
Daffodils are out of the ground around the old dog statue, the surrounding yard moldy-looking from the light frost. A distant bluebird.
After 24 hours of rain, water streams from the mountain’s every pore. The daffodils’ last trumpet points toward the forest.
Looking through a series of thin screens: swirling snowflakes, greening lilac, yellow forsythia, bare trees, holey clouds.
Rainy, breezy and intermittently bright. The zigzag flight of a phoebe finding breakfast above the daffodils.
Warm rain. Phoebe and robin drown out the night chant of peepers. All the daffodils’ cups have turned bottoms-up.
Snowflakes dance wildly but all the daffodils can do is nod and sway. O sweet Canada, sings the sparrow.
The early miniature daffodils are mostly done, hanging limp as burst balloons. Two chipping sparrows hop among them, pecking at the dirt.
Overcast with 100% chance of yellow: daffodils, forsythia, spicebush. A yellow-bellied sapsucker looking all tapped out.
After yesterday’s warmth, the daffodils are out by the hundreds, along with the less-celebrated bittercress, that lacy and delicate invader.
Fat snowflakes fall on the daffodils’ down-turned cups, while a towhee chants—according to the time-worn birders’ mnemonic—Drink! Drink!