The Welsh name for the daffodil is cenhinen Bedr. Peter's leek. Saint Peter's leek. It blooms on the first of March, Saint David's Day, the day Wales marks as its own, and it comes back every year from ground that looked, through the winter months, like it had given up on the whole project.
This is what the daffodil does. It insists.
The Flower
There is nothing tentative about a daffodil. It doesn't edge into spring the way some flowers do, with the caution of something that has been burned before and is not entirely sure it should try again. It comes up fast and it comes up in numbers and it is yellow in the specific, unambiguous way that yellow wants to be in March, when the grey of the Welsh winter has gone on long enough and the eye is ready for something that makes a claim.
I have watched daffodils come up in the garden here for two years now since I came back. The first year I was surprised by them. I had not planted them and had not thought to expect them. They had been here before me, in the ground, through all the winters when I was somewhere else. They didn't need my attention to keep doing what they do.
The second year I watched for them. I knew they were coming. I knew approximately where and I knew approximately when, and I watched the ground in that particular way you watch for something you are expecting and still, when they arrived, I was glad.
The Name I Gave Her
Daffodil is what I called her. Not always. Not in the ordinary run of a day. But in the specific moments, the particular register of a bedtime, the last thing said before she crossed into sleep. Nos da, daffodil.
I did not choose this name consciously. It was not a decision. It arrived the way the right names arrive, from somewhere below the deliberate, and once it had arrived it was so entirely correct that using it felt like recognition rather than invention.
She was not particularly yellow. She was not particularly March. But she had the quality of the daffodil that matters more than the colour: the quality of arriving with certainty. Of claiming space without apology. Of being, when she was present, entirely present, in the specific way that two-and-a-half-year-olds are present, which is completely, with no reservation held back.
The Album, The Book
I named the album Daffodil because the songs in it are the songs I wrote in the years when she was with us, the years when the valley was full and the house was full and the world was at the resolution she had taught me to see it at. To name it anything else would have been wrong.
The book is Daffodil for the same reason. Because the book is about those years, and she is the centre of those years, and to write around that centre without naming it would have been a form of cowardice I am not willing to perform.
Naming is not a way of keeping someone. I know this. Naming is a way of refusing to let them be unnamed. The refusal matters, even if it doesn't alter the facts.
Cenhinen Bedr
Saint Peter's leek. I have thought about this name sometimes. Peter's flower. The one that comes back.
The first of March. The end of the long grey. The moment when the ground that appeared to be finished proves that it was only resting, only waiting for the temperature to shift by the necessary degrees, only holding in reserve what it had been holding through all of January and February.
What the daffodil knows, that we have to keep relearning, is that nothing that was real stops being real. The cold months are real. The bare ground is real. And the coming back is also real, and it is not a contradiction of the winter. It is what comes after winter. It is the ground doing what the ground does when the conditions are right.
I am not making a promise here that things get easier, or that grief resolves into something tidy. It doesn't. I know this and I won't say otherwise.
What I am saying is that the ground holds things through the winter. That the coming back is real, even if you cannot see it in December. That the name I called her is still the name, and that the flower still comes up on the first of March, whether or not I am watching for it.
Nos da, daffodil.
She was here. She was entirely here. That doesn't stop being true.