Daffodils Are Important

Daffodils Are Important

My Dentist has this thing about daffodils.  Locally, every Spring, there is something called the “Daffodil Festival”.  It’s a local thing – like the “Artichoke Festival” in Castroville, California.  Or the “Corn Festival” in Hayes, Kansas.  Other than these celebrations of specific plants, sometimes animals – like the “Oyster Festival” in a neighboring town – there would no reason whatever, to go to, or even stop except maybe to get gas, in these hamlets of rural integrity.

As you would be driving along through most states, small towns like ours are not even an exit.  Seriously, there is no designation of on the Interstate that my town is even on the planet.  You have to get off on a state highway to find the first sign to take you to a county road to take you to a rural road to get here.  But every year we go nuts for our very special daffodils.

And we do have daffodils.  By the ton, by the woodsy fields and fields of daffodils.  There is no need to plant them.  If anyone has every stuck one daffodil bulb in the ground, give them a few years and they are popping up like bamboo in the Amazon.

They are extremely eye-popping yellow, have a cute sort of design – a cuplet in the middle with radiating perpendicular petals.  Pretty.  Not like beeyootiful, like maybe orchids or tulips or roses.  But very cute.  Kind of humble.  Like a button nose little girl with freckles. 

So what does this festival entail?  About a thousand paintings, watercolors, drawings and photographs of – say it together – daffodils.  Booths lining the town’s main street, which is easy to find, not only because it is pretty much the towns only well paved road, but because it is named “Main Street”.  Each booth with a singular artist’s unique interpretation of the daffodil.  Considering the daffodil comes in two varieties; big yellow ones and small yellow ones, there is not a great deal of true uniqueness each artist can throw at the subject.

Now, I realize there will be some folks out there who will say, “Hey daffodils can come in a yellow middle and white petals around it, or vice versa.”  Actually, in rural Virginia this is not true.  All we have here are the all yellow ones.  SO butt outta my blog on that one.

What I like and must say is the most important thing about daffodils, is that they do come up and blossom every year as almost the first evidence of Spring.  Like today, it is raining the temperature is clammy cold and it is raining a solid rain.  Everything everywhere you look is still dirty winter gray-brown and mostly winter dead.  In short – today is a depressing day.  Really I-have-had-enough-of-this-shit day.  I NEED Spring day.

Yesterday evening I heard crickets going at full volume and this morning, driving into town – daffodils!  Daffodils everywhere.  Beautiful little jewels of color splattered amongst all the dead gray and brown of late Winter and early Spring.

Every time I visit my Dentist I see how much she loves Daffodils by all the posters and paintings she buys every year at the “Daffodil Festival”.  This Artwork hangs on every available wall in every patient room in her clinic, including the waiting room.

When I am having my teeth cleaned or a filling done, I am staring at daffodils.  When I have been having a root canal, of which I have had several, in her clinic, I am forced to stare at daffodils.  No matter what season I am in one of her chairs in her clinic, I AM STARING AT FUCKING DAFFODILS!

So I will not say I hate daffodils, because my dentist tends to shove them in my face all the time – when I am stressed and in pain.  And, I cannot say I love them because they are a wonderful harbinger Spring.  But I kind of must say, if you are a person who tends to be influenced a great deal by real depression, they are pretty important.

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