Spring has been very slow to arrive on our hill this year. And while my perennials are gradually pushing up, the only real color that has broken through the drab grey-brown of our still mostly dormant yard and woods comes from the few crocuses the chipmunks missed, some strikingly blue scilla and hyacinths, and a handful of early daffodils.

These earliest flowers bring strong memories of my mother.  When I was growing up, she never failed to point out and share her joy in the year’s first purple & yellow crocuses, caught in a patch of sun, often surrounded by snow. She would bring in pussy willows and force forsythia; her Korean azalea in full glory was a treasured marker of warm weather to come. In my mind, daffodils always seemed to be her flower. She called them “jonquils”, a name I’ve never heard anyone else use.

Daffodils    ©2016 Elizabeth Fram

As a Pennsylvania transplant living in Maine, she relished spring’s hearty blooms, perhaps all the more because she’d learned not to trust that she’d seen the last of the snow until June. It wasn’t until I lived in PA myself and saw that spring there exists on a completely different plane from the ones we know in northern New England, that I could truly begin to understand what she must have been missing.

As I’ve looked out the window through the unrelenting rain this week, the sturdy yellow and blue blooms are a sweet sight. They are a harbinger of good things to come, a symbol of both dependability and of strength through adversity – all worthy metaphors for the woman who put her heart and soul into caring for us throughout the years. How appropriate that they are here just in time for Mother’s Day.

❖

Sally Swain’s 1988 humorous book Great Housewives of Art, is a compilation of paintings that pay homage to the wives and mothers of great artists who, like my mother, worked endlessly with intelligence and grace at home, making it possible for the rest of us to do as we chose. Check out Swain’s Facebook page for a glimpse her wonderfully clever work.