The Daffodil Dance | Byron Crawford | Kentucky Living magazine
Those yellow flowers blooming in waves along the roadsides of Kentucky this time of year are known by several names—March flowers, March lilies, Easter flowers, jonquils, daffodils, narcissus, and even buttercups. Some of the names are technically incorrect, I know, including buttercups, which is what my family always called them. But so far there is no law against calling them whatever we like. On a lonesome green knoll in a grove of black locusts near the heart of Kentucky, a multitude of yellow blossoms will soon begin their gentle dance into spring with no one there to see them. These flowers are all that remain to mark the spot my family once called home. We moved to another location on the farm, a half-mile away, when I was a toddler, and the old homeplace on the creek road is now barely a wisp of memory. Virtually nothing is left there save the March flowers, which have bloomed in profusion every year despite repeated assaults by bulldozers, late freezes, droughts, and flooding. The house, barn, and outbuildings, the orchard and its old-fashioned speckled apples that we once shook from the trees, and remnants of the historic gristmill that stood along the nearby creek, are all gone without a trace. Yet these fragile yellow flowers greet the first breath of spring each year as though my family is still there, waiting to pick them for Sunday bouquets, or hide Easter eggs among them for small hands to gather.
