spring flowers.

i took these shots a few weeks ago, and meant to write about them then, but i didn't. so here i go now, one last addition to abby's unofficial flower week.

before i begin: i know this little blog can get awfully flowery sometimes. but i thought you should know, at the very least, that i come by it honestly. here, a very short story:

in the springtime, the periphery of the yard at my parents' house is filled with daffodils of every imaginable shape and size, but it wasn't always this way. when i was in elementary school, the property across the street from our family's house was sold to developers. the once-farm hadn't been working for half a century or more, but every spring, in the shade of its young trees, thousands of daffodils would bloom.

horrified at the prospect of losing the flowers to back-hoes, my mom rounded up her four daughters one early spring morning and marched us across the street, shovels in hand, to save the daffodils. some of us grumbled, some were too much convinced of the romance of it all to utter a complaint, and we'd all been too much indoctrinated with stories of miss rumphius to imagine it any other way.

together, we wheeled load after load of young shoots across the street and into our yard. an entire saturday devoted to saving the bulbs. that first spring, there were no flowers, but the next year, our yard was filled with buttery blooms. and it has been each spring since.

the end.