It's raining hard this morning, a dreary, slanty, sideways rain, falling from a slate sky. How many more days until the forsythia lightens up the landscape with that first bit of yellow?

I thought of a morning last fall when I passed a woman planting row after row of bulbs in a New York City park. She smiled when I stopped to look. Daffodils, she said.

It turns out she was part a project that started just after 9/11 when the city yearned for color. A parks volunteer and a parks commissioner thought why not choose flowers as a way to lift people up, to remember and to look forward? A Dutch bulb supplier wanted to help and sent bulbs.

Soon the city had a bulb brigade, thousands of volunteers who, over the years, have spent a bit of their fall planting bulbs in public spaces and parks all over New York City, everywhere.

On this rainy, lonely day,  it's nice to think that hundreds of thousands of bulbs are nestled under the ground, waiting for just the right moment to cheer us.
                                                      ~     ~     ~

http://www.ny4p.org/daffodil-project

http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/daffodils/