Picking Daffodils: A Lesson in Generosity
Today's guest blog is from Heather Frankland from the Lessons From My Parents crowdsourced book project. We invite you to participate and share by going to http://www.familius.com/1lessons-from-my-parents.
To pick a daffodil or a bouquet of daffodils for the neighbors, you only pick those that have been slanted by the wind. You place your fingers as close as you can to the earth, to where the stem begins, and the dirt gets in your fingernails, and you break it. But only those that have been slanted by the wind. Those that stand straight, it isn’t their time yet. Also, it is good to have diversity so look for yellow ones, white ones, small ones, big ones, double crown ones, even your favorite ones that has fragrance and you want to keep only for yourself. It doesn’t matter that the neighbor calls them jonquils, and we call them daffodils. They are the same thing. Tulips are harder to get. Their stems stay strong despite the wind, and snowdrops and crocuses don’t last long outside of the soil. But daffodils, there is something about daffodils, a splash of bright color after a long winter placed on the dinner table, in the bathroom, on the night stand so that they are the first thing you see after shutting off the irritating alarm. This is what we do for our neighbors. We give them daffodils; we share what we have.
Although I didn’t know it at the time, my father was teaching me a lesson in generosity and community. It was something that we did every spring. At first, I felt obligated to do it—scowling while I picked daffodils, at times choosing the upright ones just for spite. But when I knocked on the doors of our neighbors and saw their large, appreciative smiles, I realized that something as small as giving a neighbor flowers from our yard was actually a large deed that could change someone’s day. As I grew older, I no longer needed prompting from my father; I would go out on my own accord and look for them. I loved the strong winds that allowed me to gather daffodils and give them away.
It wasn’t just daffodils that we shared. During the summer our garden was stocked full of tomatoes, zucchinis, and green beans. We would gather bowls of them for our neighbors who didn’t have gardens before the tomatoes grew so ripe that they slipped from their vines and burst on the ground, attracting yellow jackets.
The generosity of my parents is something I admire, and I am glad that I learned this lesson. I remember once when I was in college, I told my dad that I liked his shirt. Without a pause, he offered it to me. You often hear the expression of offering the shirt off of one’s back, but here was my dad actually doing it.
And in the winter, when that Midwestern wind was fierce, blowing out snow and dissolving it in turns into ice, when we didn’t even want to leave the house and bundle up to go to whatever was waiting outside to chill our breath and make our skin feel inefficient, we would go out and help our more elderly neighbors with their driveways as well as check on them.
Even though my parents, as do all, have defects, the importance of being generous, kind, and establishing a community amongst your neighbors is a value that I am so thankful they instilled in me. Whenever you act with that energy, you have no idea what will be the result. Once walking home from high school, I had an acorn in my pocket. I had picked it up along a lawn, and I remember I saw a newspaper boy who looked sad. And even though I liked the way that the smooth acorn felt and wanted it for myself, I had this feeling that I should give it to the boy. Years later when we were both adults, I ran into that boy, and he told me that day when we saw each other and I gave him the acorn, he had been having a lousy day. But that unexpected gift of the acorn changed it. Later on, he planted that acorn, and it grew into a tree. So sometimes you have no idea how what may seem to be a small act of generosity and kindness can grow into something larger beyond what you would ever imagine. Maybe my parents feel that way as well. Since leaving my small city in Indiana, I have worked as a Peace Corps Volunteer and volunteered nationally, too. It is a value that I recognize as important throughout the world. I am not sure if I would be who I am now without this value and I am thankful for it.