In Praise of Buttercups

The bloom of a flower has changed the world and made it ours.

Loren Eisley in The Immense Journey

They are certainly not spectacular. . .bright yellow splashes of color that appear just as the ground is becoming soggy from snowmelt and a few straggling green blades of grass are showing up for spring. Here in my rural mountain home, spectacular or not, their appearance in late winter or early spring is a big deal, usually warranting a front page article in our small town newspaper. The location of the siting is always listed, along with the fortunate person who has made the discovery, usually a child, and of course the article includes a photograph. Everyone celebrates. Spring is not here yet. There are still snow fields next to the buttercups in bloom, but there is at least a sign that the long dark days will not last forever and that the world will again be in bloom. We need to be reminded of these things in late February.

When I first discovered buttercups in bloom on our property, it was early April of 2020. My husband and I had bought our log home the previous summer and moved to this isolated corner of Washington state in August. I spent the remaining summer days unpacking and settling in, preparing for the winter months that lay ahead. I had not yet had a chance to get out there and meet people and reasoned that there would be more time in the winter, when people get together at the local brew pub to break up the isolation and share a pint.

We all have our own pandemic stories to tell. This is mine. It is not so bad. It involves tiny yellow flowers in bloom and is a reminder that no matter how bleak the world may seem at times, things get better. I first noticed the flowers when I was outside hanging laundry on one our first sunny days in early April. I had spent most of the winter indoors, hardly leaving the house except to go grocery shopping about once a week. I had not been able to visit my daughters in western Washington, for the COVID outbreak was widespread there while still quite limited in my isolated community. I was looking for any excuse to get outside, and hanging the sheets out to dry on a sunny day seemed like a good one. As I reached down for the laundry basket the yellow flowers were visible on the sodden ground amid last fall’s pine needles and the rivulets of melting snow.

The next day I left the laundry on the line and climbed to the bald summit near our home. The barren ground had been dry for awhile, and the buttercups appeared in a dazzling array, looking like a Jackson Pollack painting with splashes of yellow across the canvas. I followed old logging roads and found more of them, stepping around snowfields. Day after day I went up into the hills, and watched while the buttercups morphed into yellow cups and then into a blaze of balsam root, and finally lupine, paintbrush and yarrow.

COVID caught up in rural Ferry County by early summer, and when I drove into town I would go into the post office to see the announcements on the bulletin board of who had died that week. I had been in town for less than a year, and I did not know any of these people, but I grieved in the same way that all of us grieved. In the months that followed I left the logging roads near home and began to explore the trails of the Kettle River Mountains, the Okanogan Highlands, and further east to the Selkirks, and the mountains brought me healing as they always have.

This is a story not so different from other stories about dark cold winters and the renewal that comes from spring, the way a splash of small yellow flowers can lift one’s spirits. It is the reason that poets have written about hope springing eternal. Yes it does. And it is yellow.