it feels like years since it's been here

Maybe I have just noticed this because I'm finally on a rotation in which I get to see sunlight (and not just by peeking through patients' rooms while I am rounding, which for the record, I have stooped so low to do), but around here apparently spring has sprung. It seems too early, almost unnatural. There was no real big freeze this year, it seemed, although there probably was- I seem to remember a few days during which I raced from the hospital to my house fearing that I was going to freeze to death.

But all of a sudden, there are blooms everywhere, and the sun is warming everything, and I don't really know why the expression "everything's coming up roses" exists, because it seems to me that it should be daffodils. Roses are delicate and fragrant and fancy and romantic, sure. But daffodils are bright, screaming yellow, and they seem to be the first thing that bursts forward in the spring, announcing warmer days ahead. You don't have to wait around for someone to get you daffodils. In fact, they're best encountered growing out of the ground, a chance meeting as you're walking down the street. Or in my case, when I opened the door this morning, I found that my very own front yard was bursting with a little row of daffodils.

When I was young, and living in Boston, and first learning to really love things, the spring would call to me like the Pied Piper, and I would walk out of my room as if in a trance and wander aimlessly further and further away from home. And on those days, it seemed like quite a heady indulgence, to stop at a florist on Newbury Street and buy fresh daffodils, then carry them home and set them in a blue vase and set them by the window, and stare dreamily out on the Charles River. I am not quite at my leisure to do that anymore, but I get to cast a wistful glance at those daffodils without feeling like I'm splurging.

Which makes me quite happy. Simple things do sometimes.