If the Daffodils Come Early

1.29.24

And suddenly it was 70 degrees and the frogs were jumping out of the channel of melted snow next to the mailbox at the end of the drive. The mailbox surrounded by blackened skeletons of last year’s perennials that had long ago bloomed that flowered that lived and thrived then died next to the mums and pumpkins. When we took the dead mums and rotting pumpkins to the compost heap the browning perennials remained rooted. And for a while I think we were celebrating their lives as we drove past. As the other cars drove past. Like a wake. Now their death is permanent and ugly.

And suddenly I remember the kitchen table on the fifth floor of the walk-up Queens apartment the linoleum floor and heat steam pipes hot hot hot coming up from the apartment below through the floor and through our ceiling too hot inside in January in Astoria Long Island City Queens it wasn’t my kitchen and it wasn’t my couch I slept on for three months and it wasn’t my roof looking over the Manhattan skyline and I rolled the cigarettes and smoked them but didn’t enjoy them but I did enjoy the jugs of sparkling red wine we bought at the Ctown supermarket while I smoked the rolled cigarettes I didn’t like alone during the cold January day nothing to eat all day and I didn’t mind. For a lucky dinner here and there when it wasn’t potatoes from the sack my friend’s mother brought once a month when she took pity on us in her broken English we’d split a six-dollar meal from the falafel king on the corner he was some kind of street king handing out hot free falafel to his customers that he knew were poor and hungry. The kind of people he wasn’t far from he was poor just not hungry pushing his kart down the dirty street at 6 AM subway rumbling overhead and back up the street at 10 PM the dirty street the subway rumbling overhead and we ate the rice and chicken and soft beets and falafel with the spicy yogurt sauce the spiciest sauce he had that slowed the eating made us feel full and drank the wine and smoked the cigarettes and everything was poetry then poetry poetry poetry poetry words sang and sang and screamed and sometimes we had joints when we found the money cashing in soda cans and beer bottles at the machine outside the supermarket taking our voucher inside and that girl who worked at the fast food fried chicken place she liked us she and my friend were fucking and she got us high sometimes I got all twisted up but drinking was my thing drinking and drinking always drinking and I don’t really know how to feel about those days. I miss them dearly. I wouldn’t like to go back. And it all didn’t work out I suppose in the way I imagined I had to return home I was malnourished and panicky. But the freest hours dancing with my Ecuadorian friend’s Hispanic ladies at the grungy clubs under the subway tracks and drinking whiskey from flasks we bought from street sellers and we didn’t do laundry, hardly, dirty sheets we didn’t have food but we didn’t want it we wanted to be low low low low so low so we could climb up the jug of wine to the rooftop looking over the Manhattan skyline to ride it back down on poetry it was freedom no one could touch me we should have died there in the apartment or in the streets in the parking lot next to White Castle and I guess I did die there in a way it’s over it’s been over long ago thin and sunken eyes of darkness and crying hidden in the covers at night and it’s all steady now. It's steady now. And I would never go back. I walked thirty minutes to the library and read the books. Hemingway back then. And I tried to learn Spanish again I remember. I must have been reading For Whom the Bell Tolls about Robert Jordan’s Maria. I think I must have fallen in love with her too. And I applied for an opening at the Post Office and I got the feeling they didn’t like white people there but I didn’t care I didn’t blame them I really didn’t I just thought they’d rather give the job to one of their friends with kids who needed it there weren’t any jobs and I just wanted the 50k a year walking around delivering mail and drinking at night would’ve been nice in Bukowski’s name but they gave me the feeling I was filling out an application to be immediately filed into the trash they basically told me so and I never heard back. None of the bars were hiring I went asking at all of the bars hours and hours every day walking to all the Irish Pubs all over town and they weren’t hiring no one was hiring and I applied to the bookstore and was very professional and sent a follow up email and was interviewed and the man was a very nice African man who owned the bookstore who was opening a café in the empty space next door and combining the two and I said well Sir I’m the right man for the job I’ve worked in restaurants and I was the editor of my college’s literary magazine and he said yes yes it sounds like you are the right man for the job in his thick African accent that I really just loved I was completely enamored by the man with his button up shirt tucked into his slacks the clothes and dress socks and black loafers the clothes were the kind you buy in those cheap Astoria stores or at Costco wrapped in crunchy plastic and I thought yes this would be a wonderful time working for this man who dresses up for books even at the $8.75 an hour he stipulated. Then a month passed and I thought well I’m not getting that job and one panic attack too many hidden in the sheets at night and I said I gotta’ get on outta’ here and I did. My bags were packed and I was just about out the door the car was outside waiting then the email came through. So sorry, so sorry, the man said. Renovations took longer than I thought. The job is here for you. But it was all too late then. And I’m left to wonder what would have happened. But I don’t wonder about things like that the daffodil peaking out early or late there isn’t any point it’s all steady now I don’t have highs and lows and certainly I don’t have panic attacks I couldn’t have one if I tried I’m like the god damn trees rooted so far down to this earth I may sway a bit back in forth in the storms but no no I’m not falling down I’m watching Winnie the Pooh with my teething baby snuggled into me and we just love it I adore it Pooh Bear’s honey honey honey honey honey and Owl and Rabbit the writing is so clever as my Hendrix cat claws his way up the reclining chair to purr along with us I am purring in the warmth of the cottage next to a fire pile of red hot coals and cups of tea and my baby little girl she cries at night but I don’t cry at night hidden in greasy bedsheets on a futon. I’m too busy considering January frogs and melting snow and the shade of chicken combs and pondering winter ponds and thick grasses and I don’t know why some of us live and some of us don’t. There are no reasons. If the daffodils come early. If the daffodils come late. I’m just nature and not so prominently placed a piece of the cycle pluming into the ozone. My thoughts have seasons too and I may find more time this week in the sun with a thermos of tea for company but it doesn’t feel like whatever is buried in me is ready to bloom. I’ll go back a bit to Autumn to remind myself of what I planted there. Memories are like roots and will blossom.

     I don’t know if Spring usually calls in whispers so early. I don’t know if the daffodils are always this anxious peeking out of the just thawed beds by my front door… have we grieved enough for the past the skeletons of Black Eyed Susans and Cherry Brandies and Coneflowers that the heavy snow brought to their dead knees closer to the earth that they will soon return to to nourish Spring? The Frost Asters are flat and bowing now heads hung reverently low. They were Mama’s final toast not too long ago. Flower effervescence surrounded by crimson decay. How long is too long to grieve? I don’t have that answer I don’t have to choose. The dead will nourish us. One day weeks or months from now having taken no part myself there will be new flowers to pass and pause and smell and pick and we won’t remember their ancestors but we will remember that it was cold in January and suddenly there are the things we planted in ourselves long ago.