tossing our heads in sprightly dance

I wander'd lonely as a cloud

That floats on high oe'r vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils

I've been wandering all around, roads and sidestreets, boulevards and laneways, up and down pavements with the pedestrian traffic, in and out of doorways against the crowd. A veritable explorer I've followed what's caught my eye and found some wonderful things and found myself wonderfully lost.

I've been lonely, but maybe not as much as the clouds. I was visited by the ghost of loneliness who bestowed a chill of homesickness on my nervous frame, making me miss the security of my family and the comfort that the sense of familiarity and the feeling of belonging this gives to a person. I missed the safety of the nest and the warmth of my mother hen's feathers, and preceeded a long-distance telephone call by hours of trying to hold back tears.

But then too I've floated for the ecstacy this distance imparts, because for too long I suffered the suffocation of stagnant small-townness and dreamed of romantic grasses further a french field. Et voila, I traversed the skies that now lie between us and landed myself in this Parisian paradise.

I've been overcome by an acute case of daffodilitis! This morning I got off the metro one stop further on the line in order to walk home via the market and instead of averting my eyeline and blankly ignoring the Romanian rose-sellers as I usually do, I practically skipped toward them, as today they didn't have their usual roses but instead a crowd, a host of golden daffodils! And the first bunch of daffodils of the year always come to my house in the first week of March because it's tradition I pick them for mum for her birthday and present them to her in her bed with a tray of special breakfast. And now that I'm away from home they're bringing me the same happiness and have brought me over the wee hill of temporary isolated depression I was struggling up. So with springtime in the air and sitting like a cat in the kitchen with the sun on my back and a cup of coffee in my hand, looking at my yellow flowers it's hard to imagine I could have let myself feel sad.