From the north-facing windows of my apartment here at Peconic Landing, I look out at the daffodils that have pushed up through brown earth — earth still frozen hard from a cold winter inserting itself into spring with arduous reluctance to let go. Has it been ever thus, or am I just feeling the chill so much more this year?
And yet, there they are — persistent, determined little bunches that add a burst of vibrant yellow to inspire the landscape that draws me to view nature’s gift. I’m particularly fond of yellow, as a painting mounted on the wall behind my dining table will attest. It, dominant in size, offers a rush of color that delights me. The artist hadn’t named the work, which invites my naming it, simply, “Yellow.”
Unlike the painting, firmly secured, a daffodil sits on a slender, willowy stem, its brilliance seemingly weak against frozen soil, vulnerable to the elements once it emerges. And yet…
One afternoon recently, I parked my car in the small lot next to the post office in one of our neighboring villages. The blacktop of the parking lot pushes up against the concrete curb and sidewalk, which abut the unadorned concrete building. Seemingly, a jackhammer would be required to penetrate that sea of concrete. And yet, there working its way up through a crack was a single green stem supporting a bright yellow flower — a daffodil, looking so proud of its accomplishment.
I chuckled at the little scene unfolding before me, thinking about another such tableau — a small flowerbed my mother and I had cultivated in poor soil at our house.
How we labored over that modest plot, working the clay-like soil, talking to the seeds, encouraging them to germinate. Every day after school, my mother and I worked our little patch of dirt. Weeks went by with little to show for our effort but sore knees and fingernails needing a good scrubbing before taking our places at the dinner table. Nevertheless, we continued to water and to wait. Then, one day, little green shoots appeared, inching their way up through the clay, which in another life had formed the foundation of a tennis court. There they were, defying clay-ridden soil, just as that daffodil had found its way through a hairline crack in the concrete.
Why am I telling you this? Why do I find it memorable, an experience so vivid that it has persisted for all of the decades that have followed? Maybe it was the unusual quiet time I’d spent with my mother, just the two of us talking softly to each other, engaged in purposeful activity that had yielded such positive results.
Reflecting on that experience, however, that memory, and the flowering triggers that have recalled it, I think the lesson goes deeper, cuts into the dwindling days of the position I’ve held here at our shul for the past two years. My term as president, soon to end, is but a blip, a mere trice in a long and engaging history of our shul. Like the persistence of the daffodils that today illumine my window view, the shul was there before I discovered it, and will endure long after the intensity of my focus dims.
New shul leadership will flower exciting new initiatives that will engage a growing population of congregants to carry on the vision of the founders — they who, more than a century ago, on the hard ground of innovation, with thin and vulnerable resources, an imagination filled with colorful images, and through an enduring strength that continues to inspire, established a Jewish presence on the North Fork of Long Island called Congregation Tifereth Israel.
Like the persistence of spring’s hardy daffodils, may it continue.
Get Social