I've just seen daffodils on sale at the supermarket, blooming and lovely and yellow, but it's early June, just the beginning of winter here in the southern hemisphere. While I love spring flowers, I don't want to see them at other times. It seems that not only do we have the technology to produce out-of-sesason vegetables, but also cut-flower crops and bulbs. These daffodils will have been kept in a dark place and force-fed nutrients and chemicals, their natural flowering cycle altered to fit the time that they will make most money for the grower, like a vegetable Strasbourg goose.
Surely part of the joy of spring is the long wait we have for it, and the sense of emerging from a dark tunnel into a world of colour, scent and warmth. Is this why so many people in our Western world suffer from depression? Our joy is dulled by our ability to have whatever we want when we want it, there is no thrill of anticipation any more. I think the writer Wilkie Collins was once asked for the secret of writing. "Make'em laugh, make 'em cry, make 'em wait". Hope deferred may maketh the heart sick, but a little waiting is good for the soul. Wait for your daffodils; they will seem all the sweeter.
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