Sign of spring brings promise

The color of hope is yellow. When the chill of winter slaps Aiken in the face as it has this past week, I look for the coming of spring - the hope for tomorrow - in a small yellow flower.

This week, the first sign of arriving spring came at the same time as our coldest temperatures. Yet, there it was popping its head out of the dead leaves in my wife's perennial bed - the first daffodil.

I was excited to see this harbinger of warmer times. It was much later than it has been in the past few years when mild winters have given way to daffodil season shortly after Christmas.

This year has been different. Cold weather belies the notion that global warming is occurring. Coat weather has come too often, and the sound of the furnace turning on in the middle of the night brings uncomfortable visions of dollar bills fluttering out of my wallet.

So the daffodil this week brought hope and the promise that this cold will soon depart and the warmth of the South will return.

I was so excited with the daffodil that on Sunday morning I went outside with my cell phone and took a picture of it and sent it in a text message to my daughter in Chicago.

It's still hard for me to get used to taking photos with a telephone (I guess they have telephono lenses).

And it is also uncommon to send a text message. But the combination of the two reached my daughter, who has seen little in the way of above-freezing temperatures since the first of December.

She called later in the day to thank me for the picture, which also gave her hope that spring would be coming. Her spring is much further away than ours.

"I can't even see the grass," she said.

Whatever grass there might be in her part of the Windy City is hidden beneath layers of ice and snow that has accumulated in what, by Chicago standards, is a tough year.

At least we can see the grass. It may be brown, but it is visible and not hidden beneath a layer of ice.

One way I gauge the severity of a winter is the number of times I wear my heavy coat. It is a camel-colored coat that I bought from Manning Owen's clothing store when it was located in Kalmia Plaza. That purchase was made 38 years ago when I started my first job after college graduation.

Thanks to a number of mild winters during which it never left the closet, the coat is in remarkable condition. This year, however, it has gotten a workout, and I have used it four or five times already.

Hopefully after this weekend's warming trend, I can place it back in the closet for another year and try to extend its life a bit longer.

But back to the daffodil. We all need things to get us through the winters of our lives. There are bleak periods when we cannot imagine the sun will shine again; when the weight of life seems too great a burden; when hope seems gone. That is when we need a daffodil to help us realize that there is hope; there is promise for the future; that spring will come into our lives once again.

That lone daffodil was joined days later by a second bloom.

More of their friends will be erupting soon, and before long they will be joined by other spring flowers and the green shoots of the early grasses.

The mercury may say it is cold this morning, but I know that spring is on the way. A little daffodil told me.

Jeff Wallace is editor of the Aiken Standard.