Day 15, The Determined Daffodil

I am cranky.
I need space (physical and mental).
And order.

In this morning’s First Light of Day journal, I ask what I want my life to be because that seems a good starting point. The question “What do I want?” echoes when it hits the page.

I need a reset button, something to take my mind off the current situation and set me back on the path of cheerfulness and optimism. The only thing for it is to plead with Mother Nature to wrap her arms around me and whisper sweet parables to my heart and something positive to think about to my brain.

The sun has come to call today, so I go outside for a walk and there, in the flowerpot now filled with dead stems that were once colorful blooms celebrating daughter Alison’s graduation from college in our home-held ceremony, I spy a daffodil stretching and rubbing her eyes.

How did that happen?

In July this pot was filled with ham and egg lantana, not daffodils. Daffodils are spring flowers; lantana thrives in the summer. Daffodils enjoy the cool shade; lantanas are happiest in the hot, full sun.  I accept it as one of Mother Nature’s conundrums, something for me to ponder.

Now I may be delighted with the notion that everything happens for a reason all in its perfect time, I may giggle gleefully with magic, but  The Engineer wants to know how and why things happen. Before I can stop him, he shoves the pot aside with his foot, and  lo and behold the pot is sitting in the middle of a small daffodil patch. This daffodil – the only one blooming – who found her path blocked, found a way to keep growing anyway. By golly she was meant to stretch, reach, grow. She was meant to live, and live she would. She was, after all, put on earth to bloom, and she let nothing – not even a heavy pot of wet soil and dead (or dormant) lantana stems stop her.

The Determined Daffodil, now at home in a vase that belonged to my grandmother, the one I’m writing the book about.

She is not a victim, this daffodil. She doesn’t whine or wring her hands because her life is difficult and not at all the way she’d like it to be.  This is one Determined Daffodil, and she chooses lightness and smiles and positivity.

Now I REALLY have something to ponder.