My Aunt Altus and Uncle Lonzo lived right across the road when I was growing up in Alabama. Altus was a mess. Some of y'all know what I'm talking about. They lived in a little house that had seen better days almost from the get go. It wasn't much to look at but as long as she was able, she had some flowers in the yard. She planted Zinnias in the first row of the garden - only she called them Old Maids. They were a riot of bright colors standing guard over the vegetables. Pole beans, okra (pronounced okrey), squash, zucchini, cucumbers, peppers lined up neatly behind. And some of the best tomatoes you every tasted. Some wonky shapes and colors long before Heirloom was a thing. Big Boys... one slab cut thick on white bread with Bama mayonnaise... I can feel the juice running down my arm. There's a funny story about the tomatoes I'll tell sometime. Great. Now I'm hungry and there's not a farmer's market in sight. Grocery store vegetables will always be imposters to me. Once you've had straight from the garden perfection the waxy, plasticky stuff at the store just does not cut it. Amen?
Back to flowers... in the spring a few shoots of green would push up out of the ground and there would be the daffodils. Buttercups, she called them. They were my very favorites. Still are. I would beg her to let me cut some to put in a jelly jar in my room but she wouldn't ever let me. She said they needed to stay out in the yard where everybody could enjoy them - even people passing on the road. That made no sense to me, their house was set back aways so people would have to look hard to see a few yellow blooms up next to the foundation. But she held firm. I must admit I was a little taken aback. I may have been the least bit spoiled and got most of what I asked for in those days. I seem to recall I shed a few crocodile tears over the daffodils - to no avail. I probably pouted, too. Big surprise.
Next afternoon, Lonzo pulled up at our house in his pickup. I think it might have been blue at one point or green maybe? He said it was held together with bailing wire and twine. He was not lying. To this day when I see a beat up vehicle I catch myself using the bailing wire and twine description. I never hesitated to hop in, though, and we'd head down Roden Gap towards Dark Hollow (pronounced holler) to his farmland we called The Valley. Their last name was Harper so for a while there in the late sixties we called it the Harper Valley PTA. (Nod to Jeannie C. Riley.) He would get rolling down the mountain and pop Old Bailing Wire and Twine into neutral and we would pick up speed - fairly flying around the curves. Not a seat belt in sight. Me with my head hanging out the window most of the time. It's a wonder we lived. I understand now why Mama would wring her hands every time I got in that truck. I wouldn't do it again on a dare and my boys would not have been allowed near that rolling wreck on flat ground much less on an incline. The Good Lord had his hands full every time me and Lonzo headed off the mountain to be sure. But there we'd go. That day, he unhooked the fence gate and bounced the truck all the way to the middle of the cow pasture - the ground so hilly I'd bump my head on the roof and laugh like I was at Six Flags Over Georgia. He came to a halt next to a fallen log and there, spreading out like a yellow lake, were more daffodils than I had ever seen in one place - then or since. Just growing wild. He lifted me off the running board, set me down in the middle of those flowers and said, "Pick every last one of them if you want to."
Tears well up every time I think about that moment. There has always been a yearning in me - a longing for more, of what I don't often know. That day, I knew what it felt like to have all I wanted of something. And it has stuck with me all these years.
I picked all the flowers I could hold in my little arms and we headed home - the trip back up the mountain much slower in the darkening spring evening. I filled every jar in the house with my bounty and fell asleep surrounded in the sweetness. Enough flowers. Enough fragrance.
And there it is again... enough. My haunting word. My following word. My defining word. My calling out to Jesus word. Am I? Yes. Are You? Yes, more than. Arms full and fragrant reminders. Enough. Again. Selah.
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 golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.
Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.
The waves beside them danced; but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
A poet could not but be gay,
In such a jocund 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.
William Wordsworth
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