My mother grew up in a beset post-Depression family that saddled her with too many responsibilities, including, from age 9, tending her three siblings while her mother worked nights as a nurse and slept days.

Among her siblings was Aunt Cathy.

Aunt Cathy was always considered "off” by my hardened grandmother, though I always wondered if she was simply a maligned artist.

Treated poorly like the rest of her siblings, Aunt Cathy found solace in her room where she would stay quiet and alone for hours, creating landscapes and still-lifes on canvas with pastels and oils.

My mother, 11 years Aunt Cathy’s senior, who escaped her family at an early age to marry and bear four daughters, treated Aunt Cathy not only like the kind and tender soul she was, but like one of us. Hoping to save Cathy, she included her in backyard birthday parties and other family gatherings at our house.

Despite my mother’s best intentions, Aunt Cathy could never slough off what was foist upon her and died an early death in her 50s.

I think of Aunt Cathy now and I think of her artwork, stacked against the wall, and the smell of oil paints, in her small room.

I think of Aunt Cathy and I think of her broad smile. Aunt Cathy was beautiful with dark hair and dark eyes and a smile that lifted into her cheek bones. They were smiles she seemed to save for my Mama and her girls and maybe sometimes just for me, who was like a little sister to Aunt Cathy as she was 8 when I was born.

I think of Aunt Cathy, and I also think of daffodils.

As the memories of childhood are often a surreal blur, I remember only one definitive childhood moment with Aunt Cathy when I was 8 or 9 and she called me into her room. She wanted to share with me an old hardcover book of poetry, specifically a poem about daffodils, I imagine now it was Wordsworth’s famous “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud.” She told me I could come to her room any time I wanted after that and read the poem, which I often did, as the words — or maybe her desire for me to read them — captivated me.

This being mid-April, daffodils are long past their prime in South Carolina where Aunt Cathy and I grew up.

But here in northeast Ohio, where I live now, the daffodils are peaking.

Most notable is a planting of thousands of bulbs on Daffodil Hill, in the middle of Cleveland’s historic, 150-year-old Lakeview Cemetery with its lavish funerary monuments and mausoleums. Another large planting is here in town on the campus of Kent State University at the site of the infamous 1970 massacre of four students at a Vietnam War protest. The original intent of the planting of 58,175 bulbs was to honor each of the U.S. service members who lost their lives in the war.

Otherwise, the bright yellow flowers are simply everywhere.

Perhaps because they are among the first flowers to bloom in this region, and we wait so long for spring to come, Ohioans don’t hold back on consciously planting daffodil bulbs anywhere there’s a bit of soil, not only in bona fide garden beds, but along roadside ditches and next to trash cans, in fields of overgrown grasses, in the shadow of barns and along paths in the woods.

After a long Ohio winter, I often go in search of spring like I did this past weekend. I go to study the heron rookery in the neighboring Cuyahoga Valley National Park where the Dr. Seuss-like birds return each year to build their nests. I travel back roads, looking for the soft green buds that tell me the season of new birth is upon us. Everywhere, I come upon daffodils. Simple clusters and dots of yellow that are planted in the fall, they bespeak the anticipation of a people planning for a bright spot at the edge of winter.

I don’t know what the daffodils spoke to the tender soul of my aunt. Nor do I know why she felt driven to call them to my attention. Did she see in me a comrade in her childhood loneliness in whom she could confide beauty? Did she see in me a budding writer who would appreciate poetry? Did she know my favorite color was yellow?

Surely she couldn’t have known that one day, in one of the remaining springs of my life, I would need reminders.

That daffodils are one of life’s promises, regardless of all else.

That daffodils will always come.

That once, a long time ago, my misunderstood Aunt Cathy so loved the world, and me.

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