Bah! revisited: Snowdrops

The snowdrops are even better this year than last, when I first found them, and wrote this post.

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If you’ve been around Bah! for a while, you’ll know that I have a special love for snowdrops. And not just for that little bit of hope they bring at that moment when you’re beginning to think that this winter will go on for ever, and your feet will never, ever be properly warm again.

I love snowdrops because I can’t see a snowdrop without thinking of my beloved Grandma Boyd. I wrote about this feeling here, and I wrote about why she, and snowdrops, mean so much to me here. It’s more than eighteen years since she died, and I still feel as though she’ll pop in any minute.

I had that moment once, in a dream. I walked into a room and she was sitting in a swivel chair, smiling. In my dream, I knew she was dead, so I was shocked to see her. She reached out her hand to me – because of the rheumatoid arthritis her body moved in ways that could only possibly be her, carving small and strange arcs around the inside of pain threshholds – and she smiled, and she said, “I’ve just come to tell you that you’re doing really well.” Which is exactly what she would say, if she came back from the dead, whether you were doing well or not. And I don’t think I was, really, the decade or so ago that I had that dream. I’m fairly sure I was struggling pretty hard, in a handful of ways. So that dream – whether it was my subconscious trying to keep me going in the best way it knew, or whether Grandma really had popped in to help me when I needed her – mattered. I only had it once, though I’ve wished for it again, often. (I’m crying now, writing and thinking about it.)

So maybe you can imagine how I felt when I looked round behind the studio in the garden and found that there are snowdrops growing there. My niece Emily and I picked three – Emily, at 8, still understands instinctively that every single thing is important, and so she chose the flowers to pick, and the amount, very carefully – and brought them indoors. I had just the thing to put them in.

Snowdrops in my own garden. I feel like the luckiest person alive.