By Any Name

My mother loved jonquils, but whether all the spring flowers of yellow, cream, white, and orange, with big or small trumpets, double or single heads were jonquils or daffodils, I don't know: I know only that she called them jonquils, and that there hundreds, if not thousands, of them, spilling down the leaf-scattered woodsy hill in front of our house and in the rolling trough between our neighbor's house and ours, and that they made spring springy, and that I loved them as much as she, so much in fact that I would sit among them or lie among them and feel myself happy. That's the way I have felt every time over the last weeks when I catch sight of them in my yard or another's, or on the kitchen window sill, the blouson flower heads and pin-striped petals reminding me of childhood and of my mother.

Narcissus stared at himself, finding himself so beautiful in reflected water that he died, still fixed to his own image. I might not mind dying so much if the last thing I saw was a daffodil or jonquil or narcissus, or a field of them, waving and nodding in a spring breeze, the sun behind them, but itself not visible, so that the flower or flowers seem to generate their own light, burning to the last.