Just in entrance to the Vicarage driveway, a couple of miniature daffodils have poked up and announced themselves.
I went to a school that had a great history of educating women, founded by a pioneer in that field. Every year, at the end of the Spring term, the school celebrates Founder’s Day.
The Founder’s favourite flower was the daffodil and every year since the 1880s (the school was founded in 1850), there has been a slightly ridiculous, but nevertheless much loved, daffodil parade on Founder’s Day. At the parade all the girls in the school present a daffodil at the front of the hall, where they are gathered up and later given away to care homes. In my day, there were careful rehearsals beforehand, at which staff attempted to keep order and direct some semblance of military precision into the ceremony.
Our school motto was ‘We Work in Hope’. So I always look at daffodils, those school flowers, as signs of hope, as they herald the Spring and remind me of the hope mentioned in that motto. So hope is being announced as we walk into the Vicarage drive this week.
And then we arrive at the front door, and find our lovely lion doorknocker, sitting over a heart and a ceramic bauble that also proclaims hope. It was a replacement for our Christmas wreath, a continuing sign to delivery people and any other brave lockdown visitor.
Hope has been hard to come by this last year. But our driveway and our front door proclaim it. We work in hope, we rejoice in hope.
The Vicar's Wife 