These Four Daffodils

These four…
these four daffodils…
blooming together…
out at the end of the back yard…

 

It’s daffodil time out in my back yard and I’d been watching the buds form then the stems grow tall, buds angling over and beginning to open. The weather turned warm and sunny, especially for March, and Mimi and I checked things each morning.

I’ve occasionally featured my cats here, though not often enough, I think! I have another blog just for my cats, www.TheCreativeCat.net, so I often forget to share them here. I have rescued and fostered for 40 years, and in those years I’ve lived with a large, evolving feline family of fosters and permanent cats who came and stayed for health or socialization reasons.

In 2007 I rescued a mom cat with four three-day-old kittens and kept them for medical reasons. They were all healthy as rocks and not only filled my life with joy and inspiration, greeted strangers at the door and brought them in for affection, but were the secret to my success in fostering not only elder and hospice cats, but also in socializing whole litters of feral kittens and teaching them how to be cats. I love to have cats share my space in my garden and yard and mom always did because my yard had been her territory, and each of the others eventually joined me out there as well; no one roamed, they were leashed until the didn’t need to be, and they went in and out with me. But they were best friends with each other all their lives, and I could find them all sleeping together in a heap once or twice each day, just like the did when they were tiny kittens.

Last year, one by one, each of the 16-year-old “kittens” developed one or another type of cancer, and I lost them all between June 12, 2003 and March 1, 2004. Their mom, at 20, is still with me.

When I discovered the four daffodils blooming, on one clump in four clumps, of the same daffs that always bloom at the same time on March 13, I knew. The last one to go, Mr. Sunshine, had occasionally gone out onto the deck and crouched in contemplation facing the back yard where they’d all shared happy times and I could feel the spirits of the ones who had already gone on. These four daffodils, on the one clump in four that were blooming, were pretty much where Mr. Sunshine was facing each time he kept those brief vigils from the deck. The morning they were fully open I snapped way more photos than I knew. But what better celebration of remembrance than bright flowers that always look as if they’re celebrating, symbols of the return of life in spring.

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