A Message of Hope

Awakening

Springtime’s breath is in the breezes,

Stirring blossoms as it teases

Roses into sharing their perfume.

Gently warming, softly shaking

Sleeping flowers into waking,

Breathing springtime into every drowsy bloom.

                                                                                                                  —Blanche Day Manos

Sleeping flowers are waking up everywhere.  Daffodils, particularly, are noticeable with their bright yellow blooms like sunshine. Daffodils do more than just lift their beautiful heads to brighten winter’s bareness. They mark vanished house places. Have you noticed that? They are like messages of hope planted years ago by some person who enjoyed flowers. Cattle graze in a field near my house but every spring a choir of daffodils pokes up through the dead grass, singing a silent praise to spring.

At Manos Meadows where we lived when my son was born, each spring a clump of daffodils would bloom in the field behind the house. I wondered about the woman who had planted them. (I say “woman” but certainly it could have been a man.) What were her hopes and dreams? Why had she chosen to live in that particular spot? She evidently loved beauty. So, even though I had no idea of her name or when she had lived there, I enjoyed the brightly blooming signpost that she had passed that way.

My great-grandparents lived on a farm near the Illinois River. My great-grandmother, Tep, has been gone for nearly a century but each spring, up pop the daffodils she planted. The large cedars still line what was the walkway to the house and there are a few jeponica bushes at the old home place but it is the daffodils that are most visible.

If hope had a color, I think it would be yellow; the color of sunshine and the color of daffodils. Even though times might get hard and it seems like the grayness of winter will never lift from our hearts, when the daffodils bloom, they remind us that springtime will return.

I think of flowers as links to past generations. The people are gone but the plants live on. They continue to brighten their little corner of God’s world. How wonderful if we could each leave a legacy like that…bringing joy as we walk through life and leaving a bit of it behind us when we go.