How Many Springs?

How many springs have passed 
since she watched the first green shoots break from the earth,
 the bright blooms unfurl?

The year they raised the little cabin
she planted a handful of the precious bulbs, 
a neighbor's sharing.
Pushing aside the fallen, crisping leaves,
she buried the papery bulbs
in sure and certain hope
of making a home, a family,
of putting her mark on the land.

Here I am and here I mean to stay
each buried bulb declared.

She cut switches of forsythia,
yellow bells, they called them,
from a neighbor’s plantings,
boxwood too, and rooted them all
in the damp earth beside the spring.

In a few years, heavy with her second child,
she set out the little plants they'd made,
all around the cabin.

Her children dug hidey holes
beneath those boxwood,
and brought her fistfuls of the daffodils
that multiplied and spread with every spring.

Like her own family . . .
they moved off, most of them, in later years.

But they still returned,
sometimes with the daffodils
and sometimes for Decoration Day, 
when the piney flowers lifted their blowsy heads.

Long gone, that woman, those children, that cabin;
but the daffodils return each year,
and her mark remains.