"Yellow Is the Color..."

I am doing the A-Z challenge; today’s letter is Y for yellow.

“Yellow Is the Color...”

Yellow is the color that appears in front yards and along roads more often, in March, than any other color.  What I see in Willits are vast unlimited quantities of daffodils.  I see them up here on Bell Springs Road as well, because members of the family have been planting them since 1977.  My mother began planting the bulbs the first year she moved up here, and has the best display.  Even with all that are blooming at this time, there is the biggest area of all, that is still waiting to make an appearance.  

Maybe it is the lack of rain this January and February (Mendocino County recorded the driest first two months of the year since 1923) or maybe it is the cold.  Even though the days have been fairly pleasant, the nights have been very cold for this area.  Whatever the reason, the daffodils at the lower elevation are far more prolific than those up here on the mountain.

I took a nice bouquet to Mama, a week ago, and am planning to drop off another nice selection tomorrow.  I know she enjoys having them in her little apartment, because they remind her of how beautiful it can be here on the mountain.  She was not happy to relocate to the city, but I think she has come to realize that at ninety years young, she needed to be off this isolating mountain.

I get off the mountain a lot also, these days, what with trips down to San Francisco, to the VA clinic, and trips to Santa Rosa to get new spectacles.  I can’t believe the fields of mustard greens that still abound along the 101.  They take me back to being a child on Fellowship Street, where the empty lot next door was overrun with the beautiful yellow greens.  

JT and I, neither being over forty-eight inches tall, would carve paths through the head-high greens, pretending to be pioneers heading out west.  It was not a hard thing to imagine.  Life back in the fifties consisted much of making do with what was available in nature, as opposed to the technological toys available today.

Mama would issue the edict that if we couldn’t go outside, and “find something to do,” she would find something for us to do, and it wouldn’t be as much fun.  Occasionally we would stumble across a lizard or a salamander, and invite it to partake in the mud pies that we would industriously create, in the far back corner of that empty lot.

Why the far corner?  Because Mama would never venture out that far, and we knew instinctively that mud pie-making would not especially please her.  Those were simple, heady days, with the overpowering fragrance of those mustard greens, lulling us into a sense of never-ending summer.  Well, it’s autumn now, and we are making the best of it, spending our fair share of time at the clinic seeking medical treatment.  With winter inevitably on the horizon, one does what is needed to continue finding the joy in life.  

Yellow daffodils and mustard greens work pretty well for me.