March 1, 1956 - Jonquils

Today is the 55th anniversary of my birthday. How can that possibly be? 55 years?

One minute I am tap dancing, playing tennis and feeling like a kid and the next minute I am looking for the heating pad and aleve. Actually that all happened in one day last week. Some people never grow up.

I have been writing this blog since March 30th, 2010 and it has been a lot of fun for me. Writing the blog has given me a reason to think back over the years and remember many ups and downs. And it has also given me the opportunity to really observe and appreciate what is going on in the present.

Writing the blog has confirmed for me that life is way more meaningful when I focus on the positive.

One thing I always look forward to around my birthday is the appearance of the camellia blooms and the daffodils. In Lattimore, we always call daffodils jonquils. Pronounced jon-a-quils or jonquuls.

Daddy was talking about the jonquils along the road to the cabin the other day and how they had transplanted them from the old Jones farm property.

It seems that years ago the Jones farm, which was next to our farm in Lattimore, had a house on the property with jonquils in the yard. By the time Mom and Dad bought the Jones property, the house was not salvagable. The property was graded to become a soy bean and then an alfalfa field. Later on, Mom and Dad noticed that a few jonquils from the old Jones yard started peeping up from the ground. These plants must have been about 100 years old. How they had survived the grading and bulldozing and weeds and whatever else was nothing short of a miracle.

It was such an affirmation of resilience that Mom and Dad dug up the few little plants and transplanted them to Hunt Farm Road. From those few jonquils and just a few others they planted, there are now several patches of jonquils which spring up every year.

On the way to the cabin the other day, I snapped a picture of one patch and remembered a summer school class that I took at Appalachian State in 1975. That summer, I had just finished my freshman year of college and wanted to get a math requirement out of the way. I never enjoyed math and there was a class for people like me which was nicknamed Math for Poets. It sounds silly now but honestly, it was one of my most memorable college classes.

In Math for Poets, one assignment was to analyze a poem by either William Wordsworth or Alexander Pope. The class actually included a little math in that we learned about pentameter and heroic couplets. Wordsworth, the romanticist and Pope, the classicist, were two very talented poets who approached life from very different places. Pope was known as a very capable and intelligent writer but very critical and negative. He once criticized some of Shakespeares work as "excessively bad". Maybe so, but not my kind of guy. I loved Wordsworth who wrote about the beauty of nature and the importance of appreciating the everyday joys of life.

In Math for Poets, we also studied Einstein. Some theory but mostly quotes. Look them up sometime. He earned his stripes.

My favorite Einstein quote is:

"There are two ways to live. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle."

Math for Poets was a class about showing how math is in everything in our lives - poetry, physics, sports, music. But for me it was really a class about choosing how to live your life.

After learning a little bit about Einstein and Wordsworth and what they thought, I decided that if it was good enough for them, then it was good enough for me.

So, I learned Wordsworth's poem, Daffodils and think about it every time I see a jonquil.

Here's to nature and beauty. And resilience.

Daffodils - William Wordsworth
Original version published in 1807

I wandered lonely as a Cloud
That floats on high o'er Vales and Hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd
A host of dancing Daffodils;
Along the Lake, beneath the trees,
Ten thousand dancing in the breeze.

The waves beside them danced, but they
Outdid the sparkling waves in glee: --
A poet could not but be gay
In such a laughing company:
I gazed -- and gazed -- but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:

For oft when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude,
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the Daffodils.