Why Daffodils Are My Favorite

With the early spring we have had my Daffodils have come and gone. I was thrilled to find bunches and bunches of the happy yellow flowers cheap at Trader Joe’s yesterday and treated myself to $4.50 worth. My love of daffodils is deep rooted in my history.
When I was just about four years old my parents moved us from Dayton, Ohio to New Canaan, Ct. We lived in a little house that was twice the size of out tiny Ohio house. I had a fenced back yard and a swing set and I spent many an hour outside alone since I had a new baby sister. One day while I was rooting around our garage unsupervised I came upon a bag of peat moss. I did not know then that it was peat moss since I could not read, but the smell made a big impression upon me and later in life when I encountered it again I recognized it as my four year-old first foray into gardening.
As clear as a non-pollen filled day I can remember dragging that half used bag of peat moss out of the garage to the strip of dirt the lay between the building and the fence that ran between our house and our neighbor’s the Smith’s. I dug out of the bag handfuls of the brown dirt and mixed it in with the lose soil next to the garage. I then went and got the hose and sprinkled water all over the area where I had put the peat moss. My memory stops there of that event, I probably got bored and left the bag and the perhaps the running hose and went off to swing on my swing set.
Fast forward a few months to spring in Connecticut and there in the very spot where I had sprinkled the peat moss and watered it grew up the most glorious wall of yellow daffodils. I ran and told my mother that I had planted them. Since it was our first spring in that house she had no idea that daffodils were there so she just believed me.
Three years later I was very sad to leave our little New Canaan house and move one town over to Wilton where we had a much larger house with lots of property and a beautiful stream that meandered down a hill to a lovely pond. Since we moved in the late summer and I did not have any friends in this new house yet I spent lots of time digging around the stream and letting little boats made of leaves go at the top of the stream and watched them float the hundreds of feet down to the pond.  
When spring came to our new house in Wilton I was delighted to see that the daffodils followed us from New Canaan. On the banks of the stream dozens of yards on both banks all the way down to the pond were thousands of daffodils. I used to go and pick great handfuls and take them to my teachers and it never made a dent there were so many.  
I was still young enough to think that my digging around in the dirt by the stream somehow had something to do with the flowers appearing. Year after year there would be more and more flowers I had no idea that they reproduced themselves. However it happened, they always made me happy and still do to this day. Even now when I smell that pungent, not very attractive smell of peat moss I smile and think of it as Magic flower making dirt. I’m so glad my mother let me believe I planted those daffodils.