February Daffodils

I should be writing this a month from now rather than now, but the daffodils have started to come up. We have a couple of clumps of 3” stalks that apparently were fooled the past few weeks when the temperatures were in the 40s and 50s and the sun was out. You can’t blame them. Everyone was dreaming of spring – biking and fishing, grilling and gardening. Why shouldn’t the daffodils be duped like the rest of us? But this week the temperatures have fallen back into the 20s and 30s, and the snow has fallen again. For us, it’s easy to return to our sweaters and knit caps and gloves, and wait another month for the hope of spring. But I worry that the daffodils have played their hopes too early. They’ve committed to a cruel weather ruse, and may not survive to bloom. A small, perhaps, but sad casualty of an unpredictable climate.