Are the daffodils afraid?

Just poking tiny green tongues up through the earth to taste a bit of sunlight, the bulbs are coming out. I feel the chill and wonder if they shouldn't stay hidden for a few more weeks. Wouldn't it be much safer to stay in the dark, protective dirt and avoid the hostile blasts of late season snow and sleet or the heartless tromping of careless walkers? Wouldn't it be better for them to wait until they were SURE?

I don't understand why a spate of warm days must end. Somehow, despite the fact that my eye balls no longer freeze out of their sockets, it feels colder now that there's been a taste of 65 degrees and sunshine. This morning's wind is a bitter slap.

This edge between green and grey, between winter and warm, is crazy making. I want spring to happen NOW! Some 'mother nature' I'd make... tugging at the flowers to grow faster, wiggling the branches to let loose their green sprouts on my timeline and killing everything in the process. But this is the season of in-between. I hate in-between. I want to know the answers, control the outcome, have some insurance of satisfaction at the end of this endurance test. Instead I get mud on my shoes for trying to sniff flowers that have yet to bloom.

Grampa Joe used to pick us up in his truck about this time of year and take us out on the sugar wagon. It was late March, early April, mud season, in-between season. The ground was melting and the days were growing longer, but there was still wet snow on the ground in the deep woods. We ran around pulling buckets off maple trees and emptying the clear sap into a large tank that was being pulled by a tractor. Up and down the hills we would go until finally, when the tank was full, we stopped at the sugar shanty. The tank was emptied into a long trough outside, filtered, and fed into the boiling beds on the inside the shanty. sap would boil in the first tank before being filtered into the second. By the time it reached the third tank there was much less liquid and we were given samples of amber syrup to taste as a reward for all of our work. Grampa Joe would then return us home before bed time. He smiled sheepishly as he presented the two mud-crusted ruffians to our mother. We were filthly and smiling excitedly with our bellies full of the sweetness that in-between season can yield. When did I decide to stop enjoying states of uncertainty?

Are the daffodils afraid? Do they come out despite knowing that any manner of hostile conditions face them? Do they understand that to be the first sign of something growing is a dangerous, fearful, exciting place to be? Do they do it anyways because they must? Do any of us get a choice in the matter?

I crouch down next to the wee plants. I'd like to warn them about the impending cold weather, to protect them somehow. But that wouldn't change anything, really. I sing a tiny song. I'm still one of those crazy people who sings to flowers and talks to birds. Maybe it's because I've been offered more wise teachings from rose bushes than from any pulpit.

"Can you love without needing? Lift it up as a silent prayer.
Can you open your heart without bleeding? Take that open heart everywhere.
Can you hold a place within your breast for someone you've never met?
Well then love's not through with you, I know love's not through with me,
I pray love's not through with us - yet."