Penny Sanford Porcelains: Wish I Were More Like A Dafffodil

This is my favorite flower. The old fashioned, humble ubiquitous yellow daffodil that outlines the ghosts of old house sites...like chalk around a dead body.

This little flower gives itself away completely in a long-lasting, rich, heady perfume... so memorable. This modest beauty is far more giving of its scent than the flashier hybrid bulbs on the market.

Most of the scents I wear throughout the year have notes of this fragrance in varying quantities. That was a curious realization the other year.

This simple harbinger of spring often emerges from the cold, soggy Mississippi soil in January or February, only to be frozen, covered with ice, its growth restrained, and forced to wait to show off its true talents.

I am so inspired by this flower. Every year it infuses me with fresh creativity and stamina.

It is a leader of spring, a leader of other flowers. It sets a high standard of giving... giving beauty and giving in fragrance and giving with stamina.

Under cover of topsoil, the bulb is dividing again and again, sharing itself over and over so that after a few years, the clump of bulbs can be dug up and shared. Continuing to give.

This is a tough little beauty. I'm not sure when this variety was first noted in known botanical references, but I suspect this little inauspicious bulb has traveled by wagon to most of the states in this country. I'll have to research the history and specific name of this variety.

I'd like to be as hardy and indefatigable as this simple daffodil. In the third photo, you can see that one stem held three equally beautiful blooms. So many of our bulbs of this variety produce triplets like this!

The bulbs that mark long extinct farm buildings here are never fertilized. In the days my uncle kept cows, a nutrient-rich paddy might have dropped near some clumps of these bulbs, but for the most part, the nutrients that sustain these flowers on the farm come from rain. Nutrients from Heaven.

How does this lowly little daffodil do its stuff year after year after year?

It's looks up and grows toward the sky, absorbing the warmth of the sun, being fed by the rain.

Gordon and I should be in Texas this week. He should be enjoying time with his family; I should be learning and sewing and growing artistically in a week-long Ruth McDowell workshop.

Something happened that required us to stay here. Since last Wednesday... for over a week... we have spent at least half a day each day peeling back the layers of untruths in order to protect Mama and Unc and the farm from an unscrupulous businessman.

The details are not important to share at this time.

When I took the dogs out this afternoon I was once again irresistibly drawn to the happy yellow that looks as if so many gallons of vivid yellow paint has been splashed over the meadows around the house.

That is when I was struck by the significance of this flower in my life... the inspiration, the survivability, the generosity, the leadership, the steadfast reliability of this lowly common old-fashioned early daffodil.

It has been a rough year for our family, so far. There are more challenges ahead this year... challenges we can call by name and even more challenges we cannot anticipate.

Restoration, rest and even good health for our family will have to come from God. We are in a season of personal growth, strengthening through troubles, trial by fire.

This daffodil reminded me today that God may allow some painful events that knock us back to the ground, but like this brave little daffodil, we can choose to re-emerge from the ground, bloom again, give away every molecule of the scent (talent) God has given us, bring color and refreshment to others, and trust God to nourish us... so that we can continue the cycle the next day, the next week, the next month... the next year.

Thanks to a fragile little flower, this evening I am refreshed, uplifted, calm, happy, encouraged, and I even enjoyed a therapeutic giggle as Lillibeth decided to eat her daffodil!