Every spring I am met with the blooming of the daffodils. The daffodil has never been one of my favorite flowers, although I find beauty of some sort in all flowers, but there's something about these ones....
It has been three years now since the man next door passed away. I loved him. He was one of the most eccentric people I have ever met, but he had a heart bigger than himself and a love for God that I have yet to encounter in another human being. We hit it off. And maybe that was because I saw past the "oddity" and saw his beauty.
We somehow grew a bit closer during his last summer at home. My morning ritual then was to bring Grace downstairs, grab a cup of coffee, and take a stroll through my yard, looking to see what new and exciting things were blooming there. And there would usually be an anonymous gift waiting for me.
One day I found three pots of half-dead flowers sitting on the table. I laughed because I knew it was a gift him, the man next door. What I didn't know until later was that he had found those flowers in someone's garbage, brought them home and nursed them back to half-life *smile* with rain water that he collected in big blue plastic barrels, and this was all done with me in mind.
Another day there was a wooden girl bending over in my flower garden. She had obviously weathered many a storm because her paint was faded and she was chipped. Again, it was a gift from the man next door. And yet again he had found her in someone's garbage and brought her to me. I still have that girl. I stood in the yard yesterday, holding her and touching her painted-on and tattered dress. I contemplated throwing her away, but just as I turned around to toss her into the trash can, I saw the daffodils.
Those daffodils were yet another gift to me from the man next door. He had brought the bulbs home from church for me to plant in the yard. He laughed at me while giving me explicit instructions on how to plant them. After planting tulip bulbs of his that never came up, because I had planted them upside down, *blush*, he felt that I needed to be verbally walked through the process with the daffodils. And it worked. They're back again this year.
I was so excited the other day when I went to feed the birds and saw the yellow flowers waving at me in the wind. I felt my heart smile.
His last summer on Earth was spent in a nursing home, battling cancer until he knew that it was his time to stop fighting his ascent. I went to visit him every weekend and I would always take freshly cut flowers for him out of my garden. And he didn't require any fancy adornments. He was very pleased with the McDonald's and water bottle vases.
This afternoon Da Man and I were out in the yard and I heard the neighbors (formerly referred to as the Twinkie Clam in a past life)talking about digging up the flowers in their yard. I didn't have to look in their yard to know that they were talking about all that is left of the man next door. "What are you going to do with those flowers," I asked.
"Why? Do you want them?"
"Yes. As many of them as I can have."
So Grace and I took our garden spades and we made a second patch of daffodils this evening. I told her the story about the smaller ones that were already a part of our yard. And I told her that the man next door was so overjoyed when he had met her for the first time and promised that he would never forget her birthday because it was one day before his. *smile* And he was able to make it through her first birthday, sending a card and money through the mail instead of walking it next door.
I'm very grateful for the fact that The Universe put me in my backyard at that precise moment today. And I am also very grateful that the little girl in the tattered dress is still there in the yard. It's true that one person's trash is another person's treasure.