Of Dainty Daffodils And Flower Inspired Travel Yearnings

I know I've mentioned earlier that we have a family group on What's App and it has inspired me a few times in the past to write and I have faithfully recorded here whenever a particular post was triggered off by something that I had read or seen on my phone, either on the maternal family group or elsewhere. Yes,more and more Indians seem to be spending half their waking hours on Whats App!
The best thing about a family group is that you know most of the people there very well and it's a comfortably familiar, familial environment. Many of those folks have known your parents since before you were born and of course, landed up in hospital to see you when you were born and many of them visited your kids when they were freshly minted too! You've been visiting them in their homes for years and more importantly you share strong genetic bonds with many of them and so a common love for certain things seems to run in your blood! In our case, it's the love of ice cream and the beauty of flowers. NO, I'm not even going to start off on the I of ice cream because then I will crave some really hard and there is no friendly neighbourhood grocer to go to in Nairobi, unlike in my home town, at this time of the night! So we have people on different continents posting perfect pictures of flowers that leave us hungry for more. Hungry for botanical beauties I mean, since we, on that group, are perpetually hungry for ice cream anyway....
A cousin of mine whom I address as Uncle V, as he is older than my Mom, (common in the large families of yore!), recently shared some pictures of dandy daffodils from his garden in California on our group. He also mentioned that they were blooming beneath his cherry tree. I was in a rush as it was early morning in Kenya, but couldn't resist penning a couple of lines, in a (poor?) parody of William Wordsworth's famous and timeless poem 'Daffodils'. When I checked my phone later, I found that a favourite aunt of mine had added a few more lines to my verse and so I added the last verse! It was as if we were chatting at home and completing each other's lines, so perfectly in tandem were we. So technology, at  certain times, does aid creativity! But these daffodils really invoked a deep desire in me to see them first hand, which was truly surprising, as I haven't had the urge to travel, (except to go home for our annual sojourn), for the last few years! Contrast this with the old me who used to actually tick off Indian states visited as a child and later, countries as an adult, from a list I had! Must be the age factor kicking in....!

                                                 Picture Credits:V. Modak, ditto venue credits!

Uncle V and Aunty M graciously gave permission to share their pictures and lines respectively. The first and last verses are mine and the lines in between are hers. She blogs at musingsbymedha@blogspot.com So here's our joint effort that actually spanned three continents as the Daffodils are growing in the United States and the poem was penned in Africa and Asia!



When I got up in the morning and switched on my phone,
A delicate daffodil stared at me from its Californian home.
An uncle on our family group had shared pictures of daffodils divine,
Proudly they stood in never ending line,
Contentedly basking in the Californian sunshine.
Beside the pool, beneath the cherry tree they bloom,
And then they gently flutter,
In the Californian zephyr.

Standing upright on their stiff green stalks,
Looking oh so elegant,
In their creamy white frocks.
Smiling up
At the sun so mellow,
Sweet are the flowers with their centres yellow!
To you and me they bring good cheer,
Gently swaying
In the soft, balmy, zephyr.

The flowers tempt me to my U.S visa use,
Surely entry into the U.S, to me, they can't refuse?
If I tell them I flew over ocean, vale and hill,
Just to see the dainty daffodil!