This Weather is Fickle as a Teenage Girl
I can’t remember a more changeable weather than we have had this year, flip-flopping from cold to warm and back again, over and over. We had a week or so of warm balmy temperatures, enough to get the daffodils to pop up and begin budding, and the forsythias to start blooming, and then whoosh! We’re back to grey cold days and freezing nights again. Reminds me of my daughter (I won’t tell you which one) who used to put on a veritable fashion show every time she thought about going out. First it was jeans and a t-shirt, then a dress, then a skirt and shirt, and then it was which shoes, how to do her hair. We tried not to roll our eyes too much around her, but it wasn’t easy. I’ve always been too pragmatic for my own good. I don’t like fuss and frills. My hair is too poker straight to take a curl or any kind of real “style” (much to my dismay), and I stopped wearing makeup back in my twenties, and after I’d gone without it for a year or so, it looked weird when I put it on. And I’ve never had the right body to wear what was in style, I was too curvy for the twiggy look, too short for the Barbie Doll look, and after I had the kids, too round for jeans! Got so I was comfortable just being me in my own skin, my own kind of “style” and just left it at that. I saw those daffodils in the front yard bending under a burst of wet snow, still bright and sunny even in the unseasonable weather, and thought they just about match my mindset. They are sturdy and dependable, and they bloom when they are supposed to, not when the weather forecast says they should. The fashions of forecasting are lost on daffodils. They grow to their own inner rhythm, they grow when the ground is cold and hard and nothing much else is going to bloom. And although there are lots of varieties of daffodils in varying sizes and shades of yellow (and sometimes white or pink), the basic design of the daffodil is always the same, a frilly trumpet surrounded by a crown of petals. They are the first ones to tell you it’s spring, even when it doesn’t feel like it.
(Beautiful snowy daffodil photo by Joyce Sims)
