Old Age Day by Day March 5,2010

I love this season. Daffodils are my favorite flower, and I can buy armloads at Trader Joe's and the scent is just perfect: rained-on earth. Nothing is cheerier than yellow, but daffodils move and dance with every breath of wind. I love a flower that does the funky chicken. When I was a kid in Virginia they popped up in the yard every spring, along with violets and snowdrops. Sometimes the rain or late snow bent them to the ground, but they always stood back up in a few hours (heavy symbolism here). The bulbs must have been very old, because my mother was no gardener, and we never had anybody to help out. Dad mowed the lawn and weeded. We had three sheep who ate the hillside. The tidewater area of Virginia has a mild winter, but still, the daffodils meant May Day was coming, then a summer of swimming and catching crabs in the river. Yippee!

So the other day, my foster granddaughter, who is four, complimented me on my wreath of daffodils on the front door. They are fake, of course, from Target, but the fakes these days are pretty amazing. I've spent countless minutes feeling fake plants in dentist offices and restaurants. Yes, I am the suspicious type, and my husband is too, because if I'm not feeling up strange plants, he is. When I was a kid, there were hard plastic flowers, mainly on graves, but also in homes, including my parents and relatives. These unnatural creations needed to be dusted and washed occasionally with soap and water. I was a snob. I though plastic flowers were tacky, like plastic covers over sofas and doilies on armchairs. I'd read enough books to know fresh flowers and arrangements were the sign of class, and swore I'd never have fake. Perhaps I believed I'd have the conservatory and large English garden from which to pick my bouquets for my drawing room.

Flash forward a few decades, and I'm fakin' it out, big time. Of course, my dream of changing classes and being considered elegant and cultured - or as my brother would say, suave and dee bone, has not materialized. I'm still my working class parents' working class girl. And I no longer care much about what other people think of my tastes, and have given myself permission to just (great lord almighty!) like what a like. What a concept. So I've got some fresh, real daffodils in a pitcher in my kitchen, a dollar a bunch, and the fake thing at my entrance. That door announces that I'm not too fancy to appreciate a well made fake object. It also says I'm not fake myself. What you see is what you get.