Daffodils in the middle of the woods…..
 

 If you leave our house and take a right onto the gravel road called Swains Road, you dead-end in about a mile and a half. At the end of the dead-end is a trail that goes into the woods. Follow that trail for about 200 yards, and all of a sudden, in the middle of the woods, you will see several groups of daffodils. In the middle of the woods. With no house, no yard, and no people.

And then you start to look a little closer, and you see the outline of a stone foundation for a house. It might be a 20×30 foot foundation. And you also notice a pile of stone that might have been a chimney a long time ago. I’ve talked to “oldtimers” in the neighborhood, and no one ever remembers anything about that house. There’s a good sized tree growing up inside the foundation. There are a few old buckets and some broken bottles, maybe from someone doing target practice years later. There are no other houses on this property. There are other existing old cabins in the area that are around 100 years old, so I’m guessing this one might be older.   

I think about the house, and wonder who lived there. Someone suggested to me it might have been a hunting cabin, but I have a hard time believing hunters planted daffodils in front of their cabin. No, this was a family home at some point in time. This would have been well out in the country at that point in time (hell, it’s still well out in the country). Were they scratching out a living? Was it part of a larger farm? Were they happy? I think of the woman who planted the daffodils, trying to turn that cabin from a house into a home, and I like to think she was successful in doing that. Of course, I’ll never know. Eventually, they sold, or moved, or left, or were evicted. The cabin fell into disrepair, and came down, the wood disintegrating over the years, until nothing was left but the stone foundation. And the daffodils out front.

I’ve thought about digging up the daffodils and separating them, and replanting them up at our house. They’d gain a new life that way, and someone to look at them, and enjoy them every spring. So far, I’ve resisted the urge, and so, there they stand as silent guardians to lives gone by. Daffodils in the middle of the woods….