Spring needs to come early this year. This weekend, I visited my family on the Coast in Woolmarket. Hurricane-ravaged neighborhoods stand scarred and pleading for a fresh start, for a massive renewal.

While it was easy to grow weary as we passed the six-month-old carnage courtesy of Hurricane Katrina, I fought the urge to cry and focused instead on the spirit of reconstruction, on defiant people who display hand-painted placards proclaiming, “We will stay.” I’d be lying if I said I was successful. The tears came, as they always do. Then I saw the daffodils.

We always had some, somewhere in our yard in Long Beach, every spring. The daffodils that emerged from hidden bulbs in various beds my dad cultivated reigned as my favorite flower, even above the hordes of camellias. Some daffodils were uniformly yellow, the color of margarine, their structure so flawless you had to touch them to believe they were not artificial.  The flowers sported a center trumpet with a frilly edge. The ones with an orange middle and a circle of white petals complemented the Easter season with their little duck faces.

About the time the leafless Japanese magnolias burst out in pink and white blossoms, the daffodils would bloom in bunches from their skirts of flowing green on stems fixed straight and at full attention. My dad, without fail, would quote Wordsworth:

“For oft, when on my couch I lie

In vacant or in pensive mood,

They flash upon that inward eye

Which is the bliss of solitude;

And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.”

Recalling the familiar stanza at the sight of those harbingers of spring filled me with the kind of hope that only comes when all else seems lost.  It is the sensation of having come completely undone, of unraveling to the point of utter despair. But then, someone’s hand slips into yours, and there is the small but undeniable presence of reassurance. A cluster of daffodils breaks through the surface, and they have no inkling of the hurt there. They stand tall and wave, resurrected. They are mindful only of the growing warmth of the earth at their feet and the bliss of growth.

Perhaps I take too much comfort in the familiarity of things. I see the streets I walked and rode as a child, and a knot of disbelief chokes my breathing. They are nothing like they were, and never will be. Places I knew well, people who were as much a fixture of my childhood as the beaches along Highway 90 and Jeff Davis Avenue are either gone or so severely damaged that home, for thousands of people, is no more. But then there are the daffodils.

While the makings of this world are temporary, hope is not. It rises each day with the sun and never rests. While the Gulf Coast waits and works and wonders about the future, hope remains in the form of glistening waters full of life, in a landscape inhabited by remarkable survivors, in the unity of a people who love their sense of place and purpose even more than the ephemeral yet treasured possessions of their lives. They have lost more than is right or reasonable. Of all the things that remain familiar, grief is most abundant.

I miss my Coastal home. I miss the briny taste of the air and the view of water that never ends. I miss walking the beaches and the call of gulls and the way that the gulf breezes mess your hair and coat it with the comforting scent of the natural world. I miss Mardi Gras done right. I miss the people, the ones who take it all in stride and amaze the rest of us not only by their perseverance and will to rebuild but also by the comfort of their character. These people are the ones who shovel and scrape and shut out bitterness with an unfailing love of life. They are the ones who I admire most, the ones who even when so much has been taken away, still find pleasure in dancing with daffodils.